The Traitor’s Code

Book 4: John Cook

by Stephen Ronson

Genres: World War II

Synopsis

Everyone is gripped by Stephen Ronson:

'A brilliant noir thriller set in the darkest days of the Second World War' Stephen Leather

'A gripping World War Two thriller . . . Every shadow hides a potential threat and the tension never lets up. A must read' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Ronson delivers a cracking yarn, convincingly told. John Cook is the Jack Reacher of 1940s Britain' Damien Lewis

'My God, this was great. It left me with a book hangover. I felt like I was there in 1940s England . . . The writing is really 3D. You really feel like you're there. It's very immersive, and I love the witty humour' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'A vivid sense of place with tension on every level, The Last Line dripped with historical detail and authenticity. I absolutely loved it' Marion Todd

'A tough, taut wartime thriller that reads like a cross between Alastair MacLean and Lee Child and atmospherically conjures up the spectre of war, the threat of Nazi invasion and other evils uncomfortably close to home. Dad's Army, it ain't!' Robbie Morrison

'Thrilling and intriguing in equal measure. Like Jack Reacher on the Home Front in WWII' Mason Cross

Release date: November 12, 2026

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

Prologue

It was dark, and cold. Or perhaps it wasn’t dark. Perhaps it was the blindfold, tied rather more tightly than necessary. The cold was a given, in November, the damp an expected part of the cold. Harsh echoes suggested a stone building, empty, unheated. Moaning wind through numerous chinks told the story of a building unloved, fallen into disrepair. Or else, not built for human habitation. None of the smells that would hint at animals though. Nor did it smell like Sussex. No smoke, no leaves, a faint hint of something he couldn’t place. A cold, damp, draughty place. The kind of place Cook had always known lay waiting for him, at the end of the line.

‘Tell me again,’ the voice said. ‘From the beginning.’

No attempt to disguise the voice. No junior man ­asking the questions. Just the two of them. Cook, and Bunny, the man who’d recruited him as the Germans swept across Europe. A man who knew what to do with an old soldier who’d left too much of his humanity in the mud of the Western Front to be anything more than a weapon.

‘Come on,’ Bunny said. ‘The sooner you start, the sooner we can wrap things up.’

Cook was in no hurry to wrap things up. Wrapping things up would involve a bullet in the head and a shallow grave. Neither of the two seemed worth hurrying towards.

‘When was the first time you saw them?’ Bunny asked.

‘You know that,’ Cook said. ‘You know all about that.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ Cook asked, not expecting an answer. ‘You were pulling the strings. All of them.’

The moaning wind was all the answer Cook received. He waited. He had all the time in the world. Nothing to live for.

Five minutes passed. Cook counted them, second by se­cond. Easy to lose track, disorientation being a deliberate part of the interrogator’s toolkit.

Give it ten.

‘Mistakes were made,’ Bunny said. ‘By both of us.’

Cook reset his mental clock. Start again. Ten more ­minutes. See what he got.

But all he got was silence.

‘I was on the train,’ Cook said, eventually, ‘the first time I saw them.’ Perhaps saying it all out loud would help him make sense of it. Not like he was holding any of the cards. Not like talking, or not talking, was going to make a damn bit of difference to the end result.

Cook had no illusions. He would die here, when Bunny finished with him. He’d served his purpose, but he’d become a liability. Cook was a man who got the job done, but recently getting the job done had been putting him in the way. Asking the wrong kind of questions. Upsetting the wrong kind of person.

Killing the wrong kind of person.

‘If someone had told me I’d end up blindfolded in a ­shepherd’s croft singing for my supper,’ Cook said, ‘I’d have put money on it being you asking the questions. You, or Margaret.’

Bunny didn’t respond. Cook took it as a win, a confirmation that they were, indeed, in a shepherd’s croft. Which put them in Scotland. Which accounted for the godforsaken weather and the foreign smells on the air. A childish game, but one of the things he’d learnt over the years. Information being power, and all that.

Bunny breathed through his nose, loudly. Calm, measured. He’d be thinking. Planning. All the time in the world. Don’t engage with the prisoner. Another thing Cook had learnt. An interrogation proceeded on the terms of the interrogator, never vice versa. Never even let your man think he has control.

‘Speaking of Margaret,’ Cook said. ‘I assume you found her body?’

1

Taking the train had been a mistake. Not that Cook had much of a choice. As a farmer, he received an extra petrol ­ration, the fuel dyed red to stop it being sold on. Meant to help him make deliveries, pick up supplies, keeping the ­country fed while Hitler’s U-boats preyed on Britain’s shipping.

Turned out thieves didn’t care if the petrol was red. They could filter it if they wanted to make the effort, or sell it as it was, black market customers willing to run the risk of being inspected. Which was how Cook had found his tank of farm fuel empty, the spigot smashed.

His fault, of course. Should have done a better job with a secondary perimeter. Heavier locks on heavier gates. All a bit much on a rural farm in Sussex. Not normally a hotbed of crime. But things were changing.

So the train had been the logical choice.

He’d been talked into getting a cow. A heifer, to be exact – a two-year-old strawberry roan named Millie. His evacuees, Elizabeth and Frankie, wanted fresh milk. Elizabeth wanted the routine. Wanted to learn to milk the cow, tend to her. The girl had come to Cook after he’d rescued her from something no girl should have to go through. Cook was encouraged by her interest in farming. Anything to bring her back from the darkness.

Millie, the heifer, was riding in the goods van, tied up, with a sack of feed. Not the first farm animal to be shuttled around the countryside along with the mail, the odd bicycle, and the rest of what passed for regional commerce.

The journey from Littlehampton to Uckfield should have been two hours, give or take. But right from the start there’d been delays. A long wait in port while they loaded the contents of a tramp steamer that looked like it had done well to complete its last cross-Channel trip. Cook had watched a mismatched huddle of passengers cross the gangplank from the boat to dry land, make their way to the siding where the train had been idling, shuffling through the narrow corridors, looking for spaces in the already crowded compartments.

Cook had a window seat, facing the direction of travel. His sometime farm-labourer, Eric, sat opposite. Eric was a good lad, raised his hand to do his bit the day war broke out, but rejected by the army because of his dicky back, so Cook had taken him under his wing. More ways to make yourself useful than square-bashing. Eric had joined Cook’s secret unit of men, and women, who knew the land, who knew how to handle themselves, and would make a nuisance of themselves once Hitler invaded.

One of Bunny’s better ideas.

Eric was, in truth, more of a fixer than a farmer. A fixer in that he could fix a situation for you, if that situation resembled a lack of something. Cook should really have enquired how much Eric knew about Cook’s lack of petrol, but better not to ask. Didn’t want to disturb the equilibrium. ‘Don’t ask questions unless you’re prepared to hear the answer,’ his old CO, Blakeney, had been fond of saying. Besides, Cook got more than he gave when it came to Eric and his ability to find things, Millie being a case in point. Not many cows on the open market, not since the government had taken over the food chain as a matter of national security. But Elizabeth had mentioned she’d like a cow, and Eric had shown up the next day with a scrap of paper – a price, a time, and a place.

The compartment was full, all eight seats taken. Two benches, four people facing the direction of travel, four sitting opposite. Luggage racks above the bench seats. The window on one side, to Cook’s right, no exterior door, and an interior wall on the other side of the compartment, a door opening into a narrow corridor that ran along the carriage. Exterior doors at either end of the carriage.

With every seat taken, they’d all had to squeeze in closer than they’d have liked. More bags by their feet. The ­Victorian rail system, the envy of the world, straining to cope with the demands of the war.

The train clanked as it slowed. They were in a cutting, steep scrubby slopes on both sides with a tunnel just ahead. Cook looked up, through the grimy window. Nearly there. His land to the north, Margaret’s to the south, the train cutting something of a no-man’s-land between their properties, between Uckfield and Isfield.

Cook’s farm hadn’t always stretched this far. When he’d been a boy, even though the farm had felt like the whole world, it was hemmed in by larger concerns – his father content to get by with no thought of expansion. But the Depression had changed all that – flooded the market with wheat from Canada and America, sold for less than it cost to grow. Then the fiasco with the gold standard. A lot of farmers went under. A lot of land left fallow. When Cook came back from the war, the Great War, needing a wheel to put his shoulder to, he’d taken up the challenge, built his farm back into a going concern with nothing more than the strength of his will. He’d prospered, and bought unused land surrounding his place, gaining scale and building something that promised to last. His father would never see what Cook had done with the place, he hadn’t come back, one of the millions of unknown dead, bodies mashed into the mud by years of fighting over a strip of land in ­Belgium with a name nobody in England could pronounce.

The train clanked again. Cook hoped Millie was lying down, curled up in her straw. Any one of these sudden stops and starts would topple an animal. He should send Eric back to the goods van, keep an eye on things. Good for the lad to have to care for an animal. Get him on the straight and narrow.

Cook saw a man at the top of the slope, looking down on the train. He had a walking stick over his shoulder. Something about him caught Cook’s eye.

Sudden darkness as the train entered the tunnel. Cook saw the man again in his mind’s eye. The stick hadn’t been a stick. It was a rifle. Not so unexpected in the countryside. Margaret’s gamekeeper, or a villager out to put a bit of meat in the pot, a few squirrels or even a rabbit if he got lucky.

Cook squinted as sunlight flooded back in, the short tunnel now behind them. Silly of him to be spooked by nothing. The war’s fault. You read enough headlines about parachutists, fifth column spies, and invasion forces, and you started seeing things.

The crack of the rifle shot surprised them all. Louder than it should have been. A poacher would fire away from the train, along the line of the hedgerow at the top of the embankment. From the sound of it, the gun was pointed towards the train.

The second shot confirmed it. A different firing position, further down the track, aimed at the train. Cook listened for the sound of impact. Should have come at the same time as the gunshot, this close.

‘Home Guard drill,’ Eric said. ‘They’ll be firing blanks. My cousin signed up. Said they had a big exercise last week – he got to play Jerry, caught the other side napping and invaded a pub.’

The next sound came straight out of Cook’s memories. Flanders. Passchendaele. Amiens. A heavy machine-gun. Vickers, most likely. Water-cooled. Five rounds per second.

Steel wheels screamed on steel track as the train slid to a stop. If this was a drill, nobody had told the driver. Probably already on the floor of his cab, taking shelter from the gunfire.

‘Blanks,’ Eric repeated, with a smile and nod to the rest of the compartment’s inhabitants. But something made Cook question that. Leaves blew past the window. Cook pictured the machine-gunner pointing his gun high, shooting through the trees.

Cook took stock, assessing the people around him. Smiles and grimaces – the obligatory reactions amongst a group of strangers when things went sideways. Eric sat opposite, by the window. Next to Eric, the remaining three seats were taken by a family. The father ten years older than Cook – about fifty – the stiff bearing of a military man. Moustache trimmed exactly. Probably still called himself Major. Pale skin – some kind of desk job. His daughter looked to be the same age as Elizabeth, about twelve, dressed in her ­Sunday best, clutching her mother’s hand, trying not to show any emotion. With a father like the major, she’d have been schooled in keeping her feelings to herself. Her mother, squeezed against the far wall, darting looks like a sparrow – not sure where the danger was going to come from but sure danger was imminent.

Cook wasn’t worried about the family. Genghis Khan and his tribesmen could have swept into the carriage and the family would have sat quietly, waiting for the marauders to pass on by. A way of life they’d practised as well as preached. Mind your own business. Stiff upper lip. Useful, in the circumstances.

The passengers next to Cook worried him more. He could feel the one next to him squirming in discomfort. He’d been doing so since he and his mate had embarked on the coast. They’d come from the steamer, scuffed case lifted gingerly onto the luggage rack, a second case at their feet, forcing Cook’s own feet to the side. Muttering in heavily accented English that fooled nobody. Two men, the one next to Cook about forty, the other younger, early twenties. Dishevelled tweed clothing, smelling faintly of fuel oil and the sea.

The last passenger, between the men from the boat, and the door, was out of Cook’s view. Cook had caught sight of a middle-aged man in a dark suit who’d hurried into the carriage as the train had left the port. A vicar, or a curate, or some kind of priest, Cook not being an expert on ecclesiastical hierarchy. The man wore a dog collar, which in Cook’s world made him a vicar.

The passenger next to Cook clutched a postcard in his hand. He kept looking at the picture on the front, an image every Sussex man knew – the Long Man of Wilmington, a tall outline of a man, carved in chalk, against the backdrop of the grassy slope of the South Downs. Neolithic, Cook had always assumed, although for all he knew it could have been a drunken prank from any time between then and now.

The man put the postcard in his inside pocket and stood up, pushing past Cook to get to the window.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to Cook, his English almost perfect.

He wrestled with the mechanism to lower the sliding pane, trying to bring it down so he could look out.

‘Don’t stick your head out,’ Cook said. ‘Good way of getting it shot off.’

The man stopped, didn’t want to look like he was following Cook’s advice, but also didn’t want to risk getting his head blown off. He leant forward slightly then brought his head back in.

Heavy, quick footsteps reverberated through the carriage. Everyone in the compartment looked to the door, but nobody passed by. Cook looked up. The sound was coming from the roof.

‘See anything?’ Cook asked. He could have looked himself, but he was curious about the man, fresh off a boat from Europe, accented English. If he’d appeared out of nowhere, Cook would have had him pegged as a spy, or a saboteur. One of those parachutists that had the country all aquiver. But Cook had watched him stroll off a boat in broad daylight, pass through customs, and get on the train. If he was a Nazi, he was a brazen one.

‘Just a drill, like your friend says,’ the man said. He reached up to the luggage rack and pulled down his case. Like something a travelling salesman would carry, or a vet. Large, rectangular, strong leather with reinforced metal corners. Heavy, from the way the man lowered it from the rack.

‘Are you an artist?’ Cook asked.

‘Me?’ The man seemed confused. Then he realised, Cook was looking at his hands, stained brown in places.

‘A chemist,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Not very good in the lab. More of a theory man.’

Shouts came through the open window. Sounded like they were coming from the back of the train. Then the crunch of boots on the stone ballast that made up the track bed.

‘Open it!’

‘It’s locked!’

‘Fuck’s sake. Out of the way.’

An explosion echoed along the cutting. Then a screech as the sliding door of the goods van was pulled open, along its track.

Eric caught Cook’s eye, as Cook knew he would.

Millie.

‘I’ll go,’ Eric said.

Cook nodded. Let the young man do his bit.

Eric hurried out, stepping over bags, and legs, almost tripping on the case brought down by the man from the boat. The vicar made a show of pulling in his legs, apologising needlessly as he did so.

Eric shut the door behind him and peered back into the carriage, gave Cook a wink.

‘Just a drill,’ the vicar said. It sounded like he was trying to reassure himself.

Cook debated following, but Eric would take it as a sign Cook didn’t trust him. So Cook stayed put.

Later on he’d realise, that was his first mistake.

2

Lady Margaret debated standing her ground as the invader barrelled towards her, a determined set to his jaw and sweat dripping from his face, but in the end she took the path of least resistance. Timing it to the last second, she took a neat step back, into the open doorway of her as yet undisturbed study, and fought the urge to stick out her foot.

The house, her house, turned out to be hers no ­longer. Requisitioned, according to the scrap of paper they’d pinned to the ancient oak front door at some point in the night. A cowardly way of doing things, not even the decency to look her in the eye as they took what had been in her family for generations.

The invader, a bullish-looking man dressed in brown overalls, proceeded past her without even a glance, carrying a metal-framed tea-chest which, Margaret observed, he expertly guided into every door frame. How many more chips and dents could the old place stand, before it simply gave up and came down in a shower of stone and brick? The invader was no doubt doing his utmost to find out.

At the front of the house, the gravel turning circle was awash with delivery vans. Margaret lit a cigarette and watched a cyclist in the distance, emerging from the darkness under the arch of the gatehouse.

*

From the cyclist’s point of view, the house was like something out of an Agatha Christie novel, one of those where a motley collection of the idle rich gathered for a weekend in the country. Not quite a palace, and certainly a bit shabby around the edges, but it was her first real encounter with the part of England one normally only read about. As soon as she cleared the gatehouse, she pulled off the driveway, onto an expanse of cropped grass, littered with goose droppings. A car, stuck behind her for the last half mile, gunned its engine, more for the theatre than the practical effect, and shot past her in a cloud of exhaust. One of those open-top sporty numbers, a woman at the wheel. Maud let the car go, and stood, one foot on the ground, the other still on the pedal, looking at the house.

It had seemed like a grand idea, join up, do your bit, become a farmer. But what did she know about farming? She’d only been in the country a year. She’d got out of ­Sweden just in time. Too many smiling Nazis there now, sharing the coffee shops and streets of Gothenburg. ­Neutrality, they called it, but she knew what that meant. A coward’s way of rolling over.

She’d written to her nephew Ernst, as if she needed his permission. He’d gone quiet, moving around as far as she could tell. Likely he didn’t get her postcard, but the act of putting her thoughts into words had been useful. As always.

From the distance, Maud heard a train whistle. Far off, from beyond a patch of woodland. Longer than the usual toot, more a complaint than a communication.

3

The first thing Cook noticed as he stepped into the goods van was the smell of cordite. They’d blown the lock to the door.

Eric stood by the heifer, his hands raised like he was in a Western flick. A young man in Home Guard uniform held a gun on him, and as Cook stepped in, he heard the gun being cocked. Its owner swung around in his direction. Cook didn’t recognise him, not one of the Uckfield lads who’d signed up. He was young, barely out of school by the look of him, and his face was sheened with sweat despite the cold.

‘No entry, I’m afraid,’ a voice said, from the shadows behind Cook. A commanding voice. Somebody used to dealing with situations like this. Which left Cook with a question – exactly what kind of situation was this?

First things first – retreat or assert dominance? Cook was reminded of a useful saying he’d learnt from his old CO, Blakeney – you win every fight you don’t have. The sort of thing that sounded nice, and was useful when some of your men were getting riled up in a pub. Hadn’t stopped Blakeney blowing his whistle and sending thousands of his men across no-man’s-land to almost certain death. Hadn’t stopped him sending Cook on one-man reconnaissance missions above the Khyber Pass, going up against tribesmen who decorated their huts with the scalps of Russian and English soldiers. So, a sentiment to be ignored as much as it was to be followed.

The lad in front of him, holding the gun, looked scared. An untrained and untested private, under pressure, with his finger on the trigger of a loaded gun.

Cook reached out, lightning quick, and grabbed the gun. Not the move the lad was expecting. Cook t. . .