The receipts from specific London establishments were equally purposeful. A receipt from Gieves, the military tailor on Old Bond Street that outfitted British naval and marine officers, established that Martin had recently had a fitting. A receipt from the Naval and Military Club, a London institution known familiarly as “the In and Out,” established where he had been staying in the days before his fictional departure.
There was a letter from Martin’s father. The elder Martin wrote to his son with the characteristic mixture of affection, concern, and slight awkwardness that characterizes letters from fathers to adult sons they are not entirely sure how to reach. The letter was written by one of the operation’s personnel in the voice of an older man worried about his son’s safety.
There was a letter from the family solicitor, also written in character, dealing with minor financial matters of the kind that a young officer’s family might need to manage in wartime.
There was a book of stamps. A pencil stub. A silver cross and a Saint Christopher’s medallion, the kind of small religious objects that a man about to go into danger might carry. Theater ticket stubs from a London show, establishing that Martin had been in the city recently. A used bus ticket. Cigarettes.
Each item was a verification point. Each one, in isolation, was trivial. Together, they constructed a person who had been alive last week.
The care taken with these items reflected an understanding of how intelligence analysis actually worked. A German intelligence officer looking at Martin’s possessions was not looking at each item as an isolated artifact. He was looking at the entire picture and asking whether it was coherent. A man in love with a woman whose photograph he carried, who had just bought her a ring, who was slightly in debt to his bank, who liked the theater, who had just been to his tailor: this was not a mysterious international cipher. This was a recognizable human type.