Who Was Nightshade?
Hertfordshire, 1963 — Teenage love - Cold War.
Who Was Nightshade? is a slow-burning, character-rich espionage pastiche set in rural Hertfordshire in the early 1960s. The novel threads together two principal narrative strands: (1) an apparently genteel country-house drama about the Warren family, its empty houses, estate headaches, and the machinations surrounding an amended will; and (2) an espionage thriller whose centre is an improvised computer called Helios, a packet of decrypted (or semi-decrypted) Soviet intelligence labelled the “Mother Goose dossier,” and the question of who among the local, wartime circle is the elusive “Nightshade.”
The story opens with Tony Smallwood (codename Hemlock), a mildly fey Whitehall presence, arriving at Richard Warren’s Priory in Fordham Market under the cover of helping an old Cambridge friend. Richard is heir to Wyvern Hall but is cash-poor; his dead uncle Cuthbert—“the Master”—left an ambiguous paper trail and a loyal retainer, Neville “Nippy” Smith, with a purported life interest in the Hall. Nippy is the village eccentric, builder of an ostensible perpetual-motion device in a barn; behind the contraption, however, lies Helios, a makeshift electronic engine that, with the Master’s old notes, may decrypt old Soviet signals.
Smallwood’s covert agenda (supposedly to locate and secure a dossier called Mother Goose for his Soviet interlocutors, though the lines between loyalties are intentionally blurred) prompts a sequence of snooping, overheard conversations, secret returns to the Hall at night, and municipal gossip. Teenagers Peter Marshall and Terri Hammond provide a second, younger viewpoint: they stumble into the mystery, find the folder marked WILL (which actually holds HELIOS DECRYPTS and codewords LARKSPUR, HEMLOCK, NIGHTSHADE), and hide in a cupboard while Smallwood returns. The teenagers’ discovery accelerates the novel’s stakes.
Agatha Ponsonby, a brisk, worldly woman who quickly courts and then becomes fiancée to Richard, is revealed as a covert practitioner in statecraft herself—she works in an intelligence capacity. She gradually takes charge: she arranges Special Branch officers; she orchestrates surveillance; she attempts to manage the fallout of hostile intelligence actors converging on Wyvern Hall. The book moves from the margin-of-country-house comedy to high danger culminating in an attempt by Michael Rafferty (codenamed Larkspur) and Smallwood to force information from Nippy by violence and to destroy Helios with incendiary charges. Peter and Terri are captured but manage to free themselves, drag Nippy out, and avoid catastrophe; fire consumes the outbuildings. The physical Helios is wrecked; Rafferty and Smallwood are neutralized—Smallwood gravely injured and later dying, Rafferty arrested and then found dead (suicide) in custody. After the blaze, the official story becomes the “tragic accident” of a failed machine; the political question of Nightshade’s identity remains tercely refracted: suspicion hangs over Flo Hodges, Professor Sage, and others, and the text deliberately leaves ambiguity at its core.