Liberation Square Page 10

  He came back into the hallway. ‘You were outside; I thought it might be about your husband and you wouldn’t want to miss the call. Mrs Cawson, you asked to speak to me. I can go if you don’t want me here.’

  I relented. ‘No, I’m sorry. Please stay.’ But I couldn’t shake off the fact that I knew nothing about where his loyalties lay.

  ‘Can I ask who that was?’ Tibbot said as we went back into the parlour.

  ‘Is it important?’

  ‘It could be.’

  ‘Charles O’Shea. Nick’s secretary.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was nearly half past nine. ‘Well, there’s something else we have to think about.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  He brushed something unseen from his brow. ‘It’s that I’m not sure how much time we have. You see, I don’t know how to put this, but NatSec … sometimes people hang themselves in those cells.’ My heart thumped and he paused as I struggled with the idea. ‘If that were to happen, the case would be closed with his name on it. It’s a tick in their records.’ I had been picturing Nick before a military tribunal. Now, in a moment of panic, I saw him buried.

  I couldn’t be sure that I could trust this man. I didn’t know why he was helping me. But I had to know what Lorelei had been involved in.

  ‘There’s something I need to show you,’ I said.

  ‘Cryptography,’ Tibbot muttered, flicking over the pages of the book I had retrieved from Lorelei’s house. The white box I had found sat beside it on the table; it had meant nothing to him, and I hadn’t let him into my suspicion that it had contained rifle rounds, for fear that he would immediately wash his hands of us. ‘From the Greek krypto, meaning “hidden thing”. It’s NatSec’s department, really, not the police’s.’

  I was surprised by his knowledge of Greek. He was a working-class Londoner and not many of them had been to the sort of school that taught Classics. Maybe I had been jumping to conclusions.

  ‘So do you know anything about it?’

  He scratched his white-bristled chin. ‘We’ve had a few pointers in CID. There’ll be a key – a set of numbers or letters. If you have it, it’s easy to decode. If you don’t, you have to look for patterns.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ve got it.’

  ‘No.’ We peered at the book again. The strings of letters and numbers varied only occasionally between its twenty-odd sections. ‘Might as well start here,’ Tibbot said, tapping the final section. I slid my finger down the page through the first column of two letters followed by a series of numbers.

  DD2261033445298 wfn

  VN1081209994632 str cor

  TW3284408109028 pro wfn

  AM7126026369346 cor

  VN4653310089328 cor str

  DO5574301038201 wfn pro

  TL2159414038033 nor

  Two of the seven strings began with VN. ‘That’s a start,’ I said hopefully. ‘A way in.’

  ‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘Our best shot, anyhow.’ He didn’t sound very positive.

  We tried making phrases from the letters, turning them around and thinking of names for which they could be the initials. But half an hour later we were no further on. ‘What if we’re going at this the wrong way? What if it’s not a code?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that. They could be identification numbers, say, but for what? Phone numbers are seven digits, including the exchange code. Identity cards have three letters at the beginning of the number.’

  ‘Bank notes?’ The new decimal currency still felt strange to many of us.

  He pulled a pound note from his wallet and examined it. ‘No. Nothing like it.’

  ‘Map reference?’

  ‘They’re much shorter.’

  We sat reading the numbers backwards and forwards. I saw them spinning in the air, but it did no good. It drove me mad to think that these marks on a page might tell us who was responsible for Lorelei’s death and – more importantly – why it wasn’t Nick. But no matter how much I stared at them, all they did was mock me with their impenetrability.

  Then, as Tibbot went to the kitchen to draw a glass of water, I suddenly had a thought. ‘I know where I’ve seen something like this,’ I said, jumping up. ‘At school.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said, coming back in.

  I was overjoyed at the thought that we might now have it – we might be able to decode what she had been writing. ‘Library codes. To identify books.’

  He nodded thoughtfully. ‘Library codes. Yes. Could be. Where’s your nearest library?’

  ‘Southwark.’

  ‘Better get there soon. If it’s open at all, it’ll probably close early for Liberation Day,’ he said.

  We copied the codes on to a small slip of paper and put the book back in its hiding place. I had a hurried word with Hazel – with what was going on now, I thought it best if she went to a friend’s house and she reluctantly agreed to go. She had a key and could let herself back in for supper that evening.

  Leaving the house after seeing her off, I saw a figure at the window of the house next door. She was perhaps twenty-two and dressed in a plain blouse and trousers cut like those you had to wear in the army, and her appearance made me suddenly very nervous. It must have shown, because Tibbot discreetly asked who she was.

  ‘Patricia. Our neighbour. She’s in the Party.’

  ‘Serious about it?’

  ‘Very. Nick told me to watch what I said around her.’ This slip of a girl could be as dangerous as the men who beat on your door in the night. So strange that raw muscle power – the power of men – was being quietly supplanted by the power of a whisper behind hands, a force that we women were better at employing.

  Tibbot took my arm. ‘Well, try to keep calm,’ he said. ‘Don’t attract attention. Smile. Look around you. Stop to button up your coat. Just think of it as a normal day.’

  He was right, of course: what we were undertaking was dangerous enough without doing anything to signal that we were engaged in something that made us nervous. After all, we were probably the only people in the city that day not happily getting ready to celebrate the arrival of the ship that had fired the first Soviet shot against the Germans.

  ‘Right. Yes,’ I said, and I did my best to smile.

  13

  I don’t remember the journey home with Nick from the Comintern party at the hotel, the moment when he, Charles and Lorelei had stared as the world had seemed to fall to pieces around me.

  He gave me a sedative when we got in and told me not to say anything, simply to sleep and we would talk about it in the morning. I couldn’t have spoken if I had tried. He stroked my head and wiped my cheeks dry, and I felt warmth spread over me like a blanket as the memory of what had happened that evening melted away. It was something that had happened to someone else.

  I have images of the days that came after; but nothing is clear now. Just Nick sitting patiently by my side. But there is a memory I do have, distinct in my mind, of a time when I woke up and he wasn’t there. It was an afternoon and I heard a woman’s voice downstairs, strong and clear. I lifted myself out of bed and rubbed my clammy skin. I wasn’t sure how long I had been asleep. Opening the door just a crack, I heard the voice again.

  ‘… anything I can do for her?’

  ‘No, no. I don’t think there’s much anyone can do. Time. That’s all.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. You’re still coming for Hazel on Sunday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Stay to dinner?’

  ‘Thanks, but no, I should come straight back. I’m needed here.’

  There was a pause. ‘Nick, I wanted to say something.’

  ‘About this?’

  ‘About something else.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ he said.

  ‘It’s your choice, of course, but – Ian Fellowman. I saw you were angling for an introduction. You have heard about him, haven’t you?’

  ‘Heard what?’

 
‘He has a side to him.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  She hesitated. ‘Well, I saw George Orwell – Eric – on the street just last month, walking past that restaurant that used to be Rules. I was meeting a chum there. I pointed him out and was about to call over because I hadn’t seen him for ages, but then Sabrina grabbed me and warned me off. It seems he was put in one of those re-education camps for that silly story he wrote about the animals. And it was Ian Fellowman who put him there.’ She paused again. ‘Darling, I’ve met real fanatics, and they don’t look like fanatics: their eyes don’t swivel or stand out on stalks; they just look like middle managers in off-the-peg suits. Really, I’m serious, Fellowman’s damn well toxic. You must watch yourself.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning.’

  ‘All right. Yes. Well, look, I really must make tracks.’ There was silence. I wondered why they weren’t speaking. ‘Do you think she’ll be all right? It’s a terrible thing to happen.’

  ‘She’s in a pretty bad state. I’ll go and check on her in a minute,’ he replied.

  ‘Yes. Do be kind. Cheerio.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  I returned to the bed. I didn’t want him to catch me listening. The creaks on the stairs told me he was coming up, and I pulled the bed sheets up to my chin as some sort of protection and waited. He gently pushed the door – I don’t know if it registered with him that it was ajar – and slipped into the room.

  ‘Oh, you’re awake,’ he said, sitting on the bed and taking my wrist. He laid his hand on my forehead. ‘How are you feeling?’ As he bent over me, I smelled that sweet perfume on him. The one she had held out to me on her wrist that night at the party. Tabac Blond.

  ‘I don’t know. Numb.’

  ‘Do you remember what happened? Why you have been unwell?’

  I blinked. The question was awful. ‘Of course I remember.’ And then I was furious. I don’t know where it came from but I could have torn my hair out with the rage. ‘Do you think I could forget that? What are you … Are you mad?’ As I started to shout, he stood up and retreated to the wall, but remained facing me. I threw back the covers and looked down at my stomach. I had half expected to see some sort of evidence there. But there was nothing, no record. The child had been and gone without a mark on this world other than in my mind. Nick too just stared at the place where I would soon have been swelling.

  ‘Do you want some time alone?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ I couldn’t look at him. ‘Was that Lorelei?’

  He hesitated. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why was she here?’ I was so bitter.

  ‘Just so –’

  ‘I don’t want her here again!’ All the anger I had was swept up into him.

  ‘She just came to collect something for Hazel.’ I picked up a wooden-framed photograph from the table and threw it against the wall. The frame broke in two and dropped to the ground. I half recognized an image of the two of us on a day out. There was a long pause. ‘Please don’t do that, my darling,’ he said. ‘You nearly hit me. We’ll get through this. I promise.’

  I wanted desperately to believe him, but my mind was echoing with a thought that I knew was unfair but I couldn’t put away from me: If you had taken me home when I told you I was ill, I might not have lost the baby.

  14

  Southwark Library was only a fifteen-minute walk away, so Tibbot and I reached it by ten thirty. It stood at the end of what had once been a small parade of greengrocers and tobacconists and was now a large Closed Shop for Party members. The little windows were hung with curtains to prevent your seeing inside, but everyone knew that its shelves were always stocked. You could get bacon and legs of lamb all year round, and, in summer, strawberries. French wines for the price of beer. The stories got bigger all the time, so if you asked some people you would hear of whole pigs roasted on spits in the centre of the shop or whisky sold by the gallon. Others would tell you that their sisters’ friends worked there and they were allowed to take home a kilo of sausages each day. You never knew whom to believe.

  A group of Teddy Boys were standing around outside, smoking. The Teddies had arrived about a year ago and seemed to be everywhere now, wearing their grandfathers’ Edwardian clothes, dressing like dandies in velvet frock coats and narrow-legged trousers, but in their pockets they carried flick-out knives and brass knuckles. They were harassed by the police, told to move on from their pavements and milk bars, and sometimes there would be a scrap between them but rarely anything serious. Secretly, many people admired them and their refusal to conform.

  When we got to the library door, we were met with a sign saying that it was already closed, but Tibbot spotted movement inside and banged on the door. It was opened by a fidgety young man who, I noticed, was holding a collection of T. S. Eliot’s new work as National Poet – verses lauding our leaders that I couldn’t help but think were pretty thin.

  ‘Sorry, we’re closed,’ the young man said.

  ‘I know, I’m terribly sorry,’ I said, being as polite and friendly as I could. ‘We need to find a book. A particular book. Please. It will only take a second.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Please, it’s for my daughter’s homework. Just one second.’

  ‘I –’

  ‘She’s going to get in trouble if I don’t.’

  He relented. ‘Oh, all right, come this way.’ He led us to his desk.

  ‘All we have is the long code,’ I said.

  ‘The decimal?’ he said, going to a thick hardback catalogue. ‘Well, unless it’s a common book, there’s no reason why we would have it ourselves. And, in that case, I won’t know which one it’s for.’ I felt deflated. ‘Now, let’s see.’ I handed him the note with the code. He tapped his finger on the first string in the column, DD2261033445298, and counted them with his finger. ‘Thirteen numbers. It can’t be the Dewey at all, then,’ he said. ‘On the Dewey system, three digits will tell you the subject quite precisely. This one, two-two-six, would place a book in’ – he checked down the list in his catalogue – ‘religion; then the Bible; then the Gospels. The following three digits would narrow it down further on the shelf if need be – if you have a lot of books about the Gospels, say – but the rest of the digits in this number wouldn’t mean anything. You can only have six in total. And these letters at the beginning, well … Sometimes you can put letters at the end of the sequence to denote the author’s surname, but not at the beginning.’

  I was crushed, I had been sure we had made progress. ‘Are there other systems?’ I asked.

  ‘None that look like this, I think.’

  ‘Let’s put the code to one side for a minute,’ Tibbot said, back in our parlour. ‘Let’s say it’s nothing to do with her death. And let’s say that her death wasn’t an accident either. Who might have wanted to do her harm?’

  ‘I hardly knew her,’ I said. Did anyone really know her?

  ‘Most killings are just domestic,’ he mused. ‘Someone gets angry, drunk. It’s the boyfriend or husband.’

  ‘Nick’s not –’

  ‘I know. Did she have a boyfriend?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ I wanted to get back to what I was sure was the way in. ‘But this, this code. She was doing something secret, something NatSec wanted to know about. That has to be it, doesn’t it?’

  And yet, if she had been involved in subversion, as NatSec’s presence seemed to suggest, what could have brought her to it? Her friend George Orwell had been through one of the re-education camps at Ian Fellowman’s behest. Had there been other friends who had suffered? Perhaps that had hardened her feelings and pushed her to make contact with people who thought as she did. After all, during the War, we had seen acts of extraordinary courage from people one wouldn’t have expected to act that way – housewives who had joined SOE and lived in occupied France with the prospect of Ravensbrück hanging over them; quiet family men who, when the time came, led battalions into the teeth of the German guns. I suppose we all have the capacity wit
hin us – it’s only a question of circumstances.

  ‘We’re stuck there,’ Tibbot sighed. ‘Unless we can get into this book of hers, we’re blind.’

  I had a thought. ‘There was something else I found,’ I said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Stay here.’ I went to my room and fetched the photograph of Nick, Lorelei and the dark-haired woman. I had put it from my mind because the book had seemed far more important.

  ‘The car isn’t theirs, I think, so it’s probably that woman’s,’ I said, handing the photograph to him.

  ‘Probably,’ Tibbot said. ‘But I can’t see that it means anything.’

  ‘But it’s how I found it – it was hidden at the bottom of a drawer, covered in a sheet of paper.’ I was trying to convince myself as much as him.

  ‘So? I’ve got photographs in my desk under paper. It protects them from dust.’

  ‘Well, yes, but I thought,’ I hesitated, not wanting to tell a police detective his job. ‘It’s Nick and Lorelei together. How many men keep photographs of them with their ex-wives? It’s strange.’ And at the back of my mind was the thought that it was also disturbing – was it something that I wouldn’t want to know? ‘And she’s written on it, “To a brighter future!” That must mean something, mustn’t it? It’s something we can try.’

  He looked unconvinced. ‘Jane, it’s something to look into, but please don’t get your hopes up. Most of these kinds of … odd things, turn out to be nothing to do with what you’re investigating; they’re just a distraction. The truth is, nine times out of ten, it’s just a nasty little domestic incident. No big crime.’ He sat back in his chair and pointed to a badge on the car’s front grille. ‘Nice machine. Sunbeam. I remember them.’ He closely examined the woman in the driver’s seat holding a glass of wine. ‘So who is she?’

  At least he was taking an interest. ‘I don’t know. Hazel says she recognizes her a little but doesn’t know who she is.’

  ‘Is there anyone else who might know? Someone you can trust to keep all this to themselves – you understand?’