A minor road accident led to a chance meeting of two new undergraduates, whose origins, study paths, and potential employment proved to be so contrasting. War was out of the question at the time, but when it arrived it enabled both women to devote their interests to a common objective. One found her metier in the air. Though discouraged by the exclusion of women from flying in the air force, nevertheless she seized a golden opportunity to fly in the service of her country. Her wartime record was distinguished and record breaking. Meanwhile, the other was recruited into an anti-espionage service designed to curb the activities of those citizens who were bent on crippling the national effort, if and when war actually came. The ensuing wartime enabled both women to excel in their respective duties, one in the physical sense, the other surreptitiously. On leaving university their ways had taken them apart, through unexpected adventures, trials, tribulations and various love matches, but a second sheer chance in their lives brought them together again, after losing each other and forgetting their former friendship.
Lyndsey Pickford emulated the many stalwarts of old as well as those of contemporary times who set out for London to make their fortune. She was well educated and from a respectable family in the West Country. Breaking the ties of her schooling days, she first took a lowly job on banana ships plying their commercial trade from Bristol to the West Indies.
However, her heart had been pledged to London. As a member of the fair sex, she fancied her chances in taking up the recent opportunity of employment offered by the Metropolitan police during the1920s. She had been undoubtedly influenced by the Bluestocking Movement and the extension of the vote for women.
The time was ripe for her to do what she really wanted to do - exercise her love for logic in her job and defy the penalty placed on women who married in the newly introduced service in London.
But who could have predicted the perils, adventure, excitement and love that she would find on the way to that private fulfilment?
Some people evidently found the humdrum pace of peacetime lacking in stimulation to satisfy their restless natures. Wartime had stretched their energies to such an exciting degree that anything that came with the peace was proving an anticlimax. They solved the deficiencies in their lives by turning against the way of life in their own country, while advocating an alternative they imagined could exist and consorting with others to promote their interests.
Such was the making of a cocktail of intrigue, betrayal, double-dealing, unusual relationships, murder, recidivism, and sexual adventurism mixed with loyalty, resolution of purpose, risk-taking, recantation, resourcefulness, and love that this novel explores. The unbelievable lengths adopted by people for the promotion of their evil, or at least unbecoming purposes, had to be met by ingenious measures to frustrate or to take advantage of them in an ongoing dialogue of counteraction.
Through it all, one valiant woman who struggled to hold her own amid the chaotic events concerned, succeeded in reaching something to her satisfaction, but it could have seemed a pyrrhic victory to those dispossessed.
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