He would later acknowledge another key influence on his work. His mother sometimes cooked for Anna Wolkoff, a White Russian emigre and Nazi sympathiser who lived near to the Deighton family. In 1940, the 11-year-old Len witnessed her arrest by a group of nondescript Special Branch officers who arrived in unmarked cars. Wolkoff was subsequently imprisoned for spying activities: the incident stayed with Deighton, and made him aware that there was a secret world of espionage in which people might not be what they seemed.