The photograph of Pam was provided by Jean Leslie, a young MI5 clerk who was approximately eighteen or nineteen years old at the time. She won an informal internal selection process among female office staff and contributed her photograph to the operation’s identity package. The photograph showed an attractive young woman in civilian clothes, the kind of image a man in love would carry.
Leslie later wrote on her own copy of the photograph, referring to Montagu, “Til death do us part, your loving Pam.” This note was her own private joke and was not placed with the body.
The engagement ring itself was established through documentation rather than the actual ring. The planners obtained a receipt from S.J. Phillips Ltd., a Bond Street jeweler, for an engagement ring priced at £53 10s 6d. This receipt, with its specific pound-shilling-pence amounts and its distinctive Bond Street address, gave Martin’s engagement the texture of financial reality. A receipt is not a ring, but a receipt in a uniform pocket is evidence of a ring.
The financial situation was developed further. Martin was given an overdraft notice from Lloyds Bank demanding repayment of £79 19s 2d. This detail did several things at once. It made Martin financially ordinary in the way that junior officers often were. It gave him a specific bank, a specific branch, a specific amount. A German analyst examining the documents and finding that the dead British officer had a bank overdraft and had just bought his fiancée an engagement ring would be looking at exactly the kind of personal financial picture that a real twenty-something officer in wartime Britain might have.