Liberation Square Read online

  ‘Was she a maths genius?’ asked Tibbot after a while.

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  He furrowed his brow. ‘Maybe we’re looking at it the wrong way. Maybe they don’t go together like that. You know I said about patterns being a way into understanding the cipher? Well, look at how many double digits there are. And a triple. That can’t be completely random.’

  He wrote the first string on his pad. DD2261033445298. Then he wrote the opening date of the play Daisy, Daisy, 26/03/42. ‘Lots of the same numbers,’ he said to himself, comparing the two. He started crossing out numbers from the first string. ‘Do this,’ he said. ‘For every digit that you find in the date, cross off the first time it appears in the column.’ He turned his page around to me. It now read 2261033445298. ‘That’s a telephone number for sure,’ he said, his face betraying his satisfaction.

  I jumped up, exhilarated. ‘Yes. God, yes!’ We quickly turned all the other strings into telephone numbers. The second column, of three-letter strings, was still a mystery, but we had taken a huge leap forward. Lorelei hadn’t been some mathematical genius; she had simply dropped random digits, taken from the show dates, into the original telephone numbers. That disguised the telephone number. The rule was that each random digit had to be placed somewhere before it occurred in the original telephone number. ‘How did you guess?’ I asked as we went to find a call box, trying to keep my excitement in check.

  ‘Those doubles. It’s because she was lazy. Say she has to drop a false three in; it has to come somewhere before the first genuine three so she knows that the new first three is the false three. Sometimes she couldn’t be bothered finding a random place for it, so just stuck it right in front of the genuine one. She wasn’t always that lazy, but she was enough times for it to stand out.’ I was impressed.

  The street was busy again as people returned home from the Liberation Day parade. Across town, the Politburo would be taking its fleet of black limousines to the faceless prefabricated block next to the National Observatory in Greenwich Park that some unknown wag had dubbed the ‘Concrete Kremlin’. From the top of that hill, they could look down on all eighteen million citizens of our new republic – or across to DUK London if they wanted to see what they were missing.

  We entered the call box, ready to find out what Lorelei had been hiding. I dropped a penny in the slot and dialled 0 for the operator.

  17

  ‘What number, please?’ she asked.

  ‘Exchange 213; number 4598.’

  ‘Please hold, caller.’ I waited. So much was riding on this. There was silence, a few clicks, and then the operator was back. ‘That number does not exist,’ she said. I thumped the side of the box in fury.

  ‘No line?’ Tibbot asked, disappointed.

  I didn’t answer, as if acknowledging the failure would make it solid. I spoke again into the receiver. ‘Try exchange 812, number 9932.’

  ‘Please hold, caller.’ Again, I waited. Then the same deadpan voice. ‘That number does not exist.’ When the next number produced the same result, the operator’s tone changed. ‘Please stay on the line,’ she said. I heard muffled voices, as if she were speaking to someone behind her. Then she returned.

  ‘Caller, who are you trying to reach?’ There was something frightening about that question, as if it were something she had been instructed to ask me. I hung up immediately.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Tibbot asked.

  ‘She was speaking to someone. About us.’

  ‘No, no, they get these calls all the time.’

  ‘She was!’

  He huffed and blew out his cheeks, not wanting to argue more. ‘Maybe they aren’t telephone numbers after all,’ he said, changing the subject. It couldn’t be true – we had both been so certain. ‘Still, let’s try the rest.’ I must have looked worried. ‘It’s fine,’ he insisted.

  I dialled 0 once more, hoping that it would be a different operator. It was, thank heaven – a warm Scottish accent asking me for my desired line. Still tense, I tried another number, hoping.

  ‘That number does not exist.’

  At that, Tibbot gestured to me to hang up. ‘Hazel told you that the book has been up there since before her parents divorced, yes?’ he asked, when the receiver was down.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So it’s at least a few years old. And the phone network was improved a couple of months back: all residential lines got new numbers, didn’t they? If these are phone numbers at all, it looks like they’re out of date. Maybe Lorelei stopped whatever she was doing; or there’s a newer list somewhere.’ I didn’t know what to say; it was crushing. ‘Look, keep trying, but let’s not get our hopes up.’ I nodded and tried again. But there was only the message ‘That number does not exist’ that told me the call would not be answered. Then it was the sixth of seven entries. I read out the number without much hope and heard the familiar silence. Then a clicking. Then the operator’s voice.

  ‘Connecting you now.’

  And then – incredibly – a distant ringing that said we had made a connection. Tibbot punched the air before pressing his ear next to mine so he could hear. We were on tenterhooks, barely daring to breathe in case it somehow caused the line to cut out. It rang and rang.

  ‘Are they there?’ Tibbot asked, frustrated. ‘Answer the bloody thing.’

  After a full minute without an answer, I gently placed the handset back in the cradle and pressed the button to return my money.

  ‘But it’s better than nothing. I suppose they haven’t had their number changed,’ I said, doing my best to remain positive. I pondered for a second. ‘Is it just residential numbers that changed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So this one might be a business or government number?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding. ‘Yes, you might be right. Try it again.’ I hardly needed to be told. Once again, there was silence, clicking and the faint ringing, as if the other telephone were a few metres along the street and we could just reach out and touch whoever was standing beside it. But it rang and rang without a voice coming on. I hung up for the second time. Still excited, I tried the final number, but the result was back to ‘That number does not exist’.

  ‘We’ll get there,’ Tibbot said. ‘We’ve got one that works. But let’s go and find this Rachel Burton. She’s tied up in this.’

  I looked at my watch as we walked quickly towards Blackfriars Station. It was half past three. ‘Where do your colleagues think you are?’ I asked.

  ‘Looking into some phantom theft of a box of coats from a shop.’

  ‘Too dull for them to ask you about it?’

  ‘That’s about right. I’m old and decrepit, you see.’ His slight smile faded back to his normal grimmer expression. ‘But you know I still have to be a bit snide about it. Especially now – they’re talking of putting a political officer in every station so we’re a bit on edge. Anyway, there’s a chance we’ll get stopped somewhere along the line – coppers or the Secs. If it happens, just let me do the talking. I’ll say you’re a friend and we’re looking for a relative of mine who I lost track of during the War. Keep it vague.’

  ‘What if they don’t believe us? If they check up on it.’

  ‘Well, if it gets serious, I can throw myself on the mercy of my inspector, say it’s a personal thing I want to keep to meself. We go back, me and Jim. And I know a thing or two about him too.’

  ‘Will that really work?’

  ‘To tell the truth, I don’t know.’

  ‘All right.’ I was more than happy for him to do the talking. If I had had to come up with some excuse for our enquiries on the spot, I would probably have gone to pieces anyway.

  ‘So Miss Burton lives in King Henry Road,’ he mused. ‘Won’t be that for very long.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A bit too Royalist, isn’t it? They’re renaming all the relic streets.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, looking around me as if I could see the cha
nging names. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  It seemed strange to be getting to know each other on a personal level now, after we had been through so much together already. ‘Herne Bay.’

  ‘Nice. I used to go there with Elsa and Julie. Did you ever come up to the smoke when you were young?’

  I told him how my parents brought me up for a day when I was ten or twelve. We had walked through Mayfair, what my dad had said was the poshest of London’s neighbourhoods. ‘I thought the big houses looked like palaces from a fairy tale.’

  ‘The Jerries did for a lot of them. Real pity.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I wondered what it looked like now. The DUK might have rebuilt them – not, I hoped, as concrete blocks, like on our side. And it was strange to think that, as I had walked up the eastern pavement of Regent Street just the previous day, past the empty windows of the big old stores, the buildings on the other side of the Wall had once looked out on to the same road, with gleaming displays of plush furniture, jackets and boots, cots. Those frontages had since been sealed in by the concrete border that had been built right up against them, and the buildings had been turned around to face the other way as if the division between us was just too grotesque to look at.

  ‘All this change,’ Tibbot said. ‘Do you even remember when the money had the King on it?’ Until he brought it up, I actually had forgotten that there had been a time when Marx and Engels had been absent from those little tokens. ‘Or all the other newspapers we had. Sunday Pictorial. The Times. Yeah, I bet you don’t even know how much you’ve forgotten.’

  It was only a few minutes’ walk to Blackfriars, where we caught a fast train to Gravesend. Within an hour we stood in front of 2 King Henry Road – or what was left of it. Most of the street, it turned out, had been demolished to make way for a new block of flats. There were cranes lifting big concrete slabs into place, guided by men in helmets.

  ‘Lots of air raids around here just before D-Day,’ Tibbot said, looking at the rubble. ‘Going for the docks; and RAF Gravesend was a fighter airfield, part of Biggin Hill. These houses would’ve been hit a few times.’ On the train down, we had seen Yak fighters taking off on routine patrol – a strange twist of history, really.

  ‘You weren’t in the War, though, were you?’

  ‘Me? No, not this one. Far too old.’ The first War, I guessed. A pals’ battalion. Wipers or Gallipoli. Young men happily tramping off to what they had thought would be an adventure but finding only mud and drowning trenches. ‘Mate of mine at the station was RAF down here, though. He says it was chaos – the Stukas spent months busting up all our fighters on the ground. That’s why there was no air support on D-Day and the Luftwaffe had a free hand to bomb our boys on the way over. I’m glad I didn’t have a son.’

  The road faced on to the Thames Estuary but was cut off from the water by the familiar steel fence and watch towers.

  A group of children, aged between six and nine, were playing in the rubble. They wore threadbare clothes, and their looks, as we approached, ranged from fear in the younger ones to defiance from the older, as if we had come to throw them off the only playground they knew.

  Tibbot had a quick glance around to make sure there were no police nearby before addressing the boy who seemed to be the eldest. ‘You look like a sharp gang,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to find a friend of mine called Rachel Burton. Do you know her?’ They shook their heads, glaring at us. ‘There’s a few bob in it if you do.’ By some unseen signal, they turned around and marched away in single file. Tibbot called after them but they just ran. He shrugged his shoulders and pointed to a call box. ‘Let’s give it another go.’ I nodded in agreement. We had tried the number twice more on the way without luck but weren’t about to give up. We had to get lucky sometime.

  I pulled out the numbers that we had taken from Lorelei’s list and tried the sixth one. There was the usual rattling, then the long ringing. Just as before, it rang and rang without answer. I began to place the receiver back on its hook.

  ‘Hello?’ a tinny voice said through the line.

  I jumped, pressed the button to talk and held the receiver so hard to my ear that it hurt. I had prepared something to say but it had spilled from my mind. Tibbot gestured to me to calm down, and I did my best to bring my speech under control. ‘Hello. I … I’m sorry to disturb you,’ I stammered. ‘But may I ask who you are?’

  There was a pause. ‘You called here.’ It was a woman’s voice, suspicious and careful. I moved the earpiece so that Tibbot could hear too.

  ‘Yes, I know.’ I searched around for a reason to call. My mind was blank. ‘Please, I have to know who you are.’

  ‘I’m not really supposed to be answering this line at all. I’m just standing in,’ she said.

  ‘Just –’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Please!’ I said, letting the emotion out.

  I heard her breathing. Then a click and a mechanical hum to say she had hung up. I gasped and tried to call again. The number connected and rang until it cut out. I tried again. No answer.

  ‘I can try to find out where that line goes, but I’ll do it on the quiet when I’m back at the station,’ Tibbot said. ‘Better to keep things quiet.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘We’ll get there, honest. But for now, we’ll try the neighbours about Rachel.’

  We knocked on doors and stopped people in the street. After a while we tried a door in desperate need of patching up and painting – a lower corner seemed to have been kicked away. It was opened by a woman shrunken by age. ‘Good morning, madam,’ said Tibbot. ‘We’re from the council.’ He didn’t want any repercussions from these enquiries. ‘We’re asking about a woman named Rachel Burton. She used to live around here. Did you ever know her?’

  The woman’s lips twitched as she said the name to herself. ‘Rachel. Yes. Yes.’ I shot a look at Tibbot, keeping my excitement under control. ‘Would you like to come in?’

  ‘Yes, we would. Thank you very much.’ She shuffled to a draughty front parlour and asked us to sit on a pair of upright wooden chairs that barely took our weight. ‘How did you know her?’ Tibbot asked.

  ‘Oh. Oh, yes,’ she said, staring at us, before going slowly to the kitchen. ‘I would like some tea,’ she mumbled.

  ‘How did you meet her?’ Tibbot called through the open doorway, gently pressing her. We waited, listening to the kettle whistle. She didn’t reply until she returned with three cups of weak tea. ‘How did you know Rachel?’

  ‘This is my husband.’ She touched a framed fading photograph of a man in clothes from the beginning of the century, on the crumb-laden table beside her.

  ‘Your husband?’

  She lifted his photograph. ‘This is him. Lionel.’ Her mouth quivered. ‘The War, you see.’ She meant the first War, the Great War. The carousel of battles had just kept spinning.

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ Tibbot waited until she replaced the photograph. ‘And he introduced you to Rachel?’ She looked away and dabbed the corner of her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Was it him who introduced you to Rachel?’

  ‘Rachel?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked at me and squinted. ‘Are you Rachel?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  She waited for us to say something more. ‘Do you remember Rachel? Rachel Burton?’ Tibbot asked again.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Rachel Burton?’

  She stared blankly at us. Tibbot smiled at her and we stood up. ‘Well, thank you for your time,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I repeated unhappily.

  ‘Are you going?’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid we have to go now.’

  ‘Oh. Well, please come again.’

  ‘We’ll be sure to,’ I replied.

  On our way out, Tibbot slipped a pound note under the cushion on the chair. She would find it later. ‘She shouldn’t live like this,’ he said, as we fe
lt the cold air outside.

  ‘I know. Awful, isn’t it?’

  He rubbed his hands together against the cold. ‘Streets like this, they used to leave their doors open. Everyone’s gran.’

  ‘I grew up on a street like this.’

  We picked our way over rubble. ‘I had a case last month,’ he said. ‘Postman found an old boy locked in a flat. The poor bloke was shivering – no heat in the place, hardly any clothes, covered in bruises. He wouldn’t say a word, but it turned out it was his daughters knocking him about. Never let him out. Kept him for his war pension. Extra few quid. Never used to be like that. Never.’

  I looked back at the woman’s battered door. Age was something we couldn’t help, but our families – they were supposed to stay with us. It was so unnatural to be cut off.

  We tried more doors, but people had moved around so much – first when the Germans landed at Portsmouth after D-Day, and later when the Soviets had followed and started reassigning homes. Those old communities where people knew everyone in their street had been splintered and no one could help us. ‘Well, that puts the kibosh on that,’ Tibbot sighed.

  ‘What about the doctor who was given Rachel’s car?’

  ‘Richard Larren. No address for him, and Kenneth couldn’t find any more details in the records – he even tried the Medical Board, but they’re closed today. I can call them tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow could be too late.’

  ‘I know, but I can’t see how else to go about it.’

  ‘Perhaps Nick knew him,’ I said, grasping at straws. ‘Let’s find out.’

  At the end of the road there was a pub. It had a wooden telephone booth covered with messages scratched in ink – swear words, names and dates, a childish joke. I called a familiar number and the line was answered immediately.

  ‘The consulting rooms of Nicholas Cawson. Charles O’Shea speaking.’