WHILE his men were out in force, searching in vain for a notorious communist courier, the police chief spent the night dancing with a charming young Englishwoman at a New Year’s Eve ball. His dance partner was, of course, the very agent his officers were hunting. They never caught her; nobody ever did.
Noreen Branson knew how to dance in respectable company — she had, after all, been a debutante. But her aristocratic upbringing at her grandparents’ house in Berkeley Square had not been as untroubled as it might sound: at the age of eight, in 1918, she was suddenly orphaned when both her parents died within days of each other.
Her mother fell to typhoid and then her father was killed in combat. Little Noreen Browne developed a loathing of war which never left her, and which perhaps determined the course of her adult life.
