Liberation Square Read online

  Hazel had composed herself. ‘Please, can I go?’ she said.

  ‘No.’ But there was clearly something she was keeping to herself, and I softened. ‘Hazel, whatever it is, you can tell me. I only want what’s best for you and your dad.’ She hesitated, unable to decide whether to tell me. But the girl was fourteen and her need to trust someone was winning. ‘Hazel?’

  ‘I think …’ she stammered. She lowered her voice and I had to lean in to hear her properly. ‘I think Mum was hiding something. In my room.’

  I glanced around. ‘What do you mean?’ But already my mind was racing on. It made some sense out of a situation that seemed inexplicable: the Secs wouldn’t normally attend a domestic death; their work was political – subversives, plots against the state. So what had Lorelei got herself into? ‘Is that why NatSec was at your house?’ I asked, with some trepidation. She nodded, and I began to understand why the girl was so desperate. I gripped her hand in mine and stared straight ahead as my mind worked double speed. ‘Hazel, what was she hiding?’

  She was about to answer but halted at the sight of a young couple walking past, wearing worker’s caps with Spartacist badges on them. They were probably off to a meeting in advance of Liberation Day. Hazel waited until they had gone before she spoke. ‘I’m not sure.’ She put her hands to her cheeks. ‘She did it even before Mum and Dad split up. They didn’t know I knew about it.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  She hesitated. ‘In the ceiling. You can take the light fitting out and there’s a sort of hole you can put things in. Mum put them there when she thought I was asleep.’

  It wasn’t unusual for people to have hiding places – for fake food coupons, foreign currency or pro-American samizdat leaflets surreptitiously circulated among the most trusted friends. But somehow this sounded different.

  ‘What was she hiding?’ I made her look at me. ‘It’s important.’

  She glanced nervously at the backs of the Spartacist couple as they disappeared into the smog. ‘I’m not sure. It was boxes, white boxes made out of card. This big.’ She held her palms about thirty centimetres apart.

  Card boxes that size, well, that could be anything. ‘Do you know what was in them?’

  ‘I never looked. I thought Mum might catch me.’

  ‘I’ll get them,’ I said.

  I had no idea if Lorelei’s house had been searched. If it had been, the police or the Secs might have found whatever it was she had been storing. They might have thought Nick was involved and that was why they had taken him. On the other hand, if the house hadn’t yet been searched, I felt that I had to get there before it was, or that evidence could be held against Nick and he might never be released. Perhaps if I hadn’t felt so guilty for suspecting him earlier, and desperately needed to make penance for it, I wouldn’t have had the courage. It just wasn’t the sort of reckless thing I would do.

  ‘Will you?’

  I pulled together as much resolve as I could find in myself. ‘Yes.’

  We talk of love as such a powerful driver of what we say and do, but sometimes guilt is just as strong.

  It took me half an hour to walk back to Lorelei’s house over Blackfriars Bridge, past the bombed-out shops and even an old Victorian doss house where the destitute once slept in coffin-like boxes for a few pence per night.

  I had lived through the hunger of the Depression and the sheer brutality of the War, and I would never shake those memories; yet from that massed rubble we would create something to be proud of. I was certain of that. Ending the slum poverty was the first step, and all those new tower blocks were proof of our intention. No, our new nation wasn’t spotless – people talked quietly of NatSec’s visits during the night; and it felt low after five hundred years of parliaments to have a government choose itself – but the free hospitals and schools we were promised had to count for something. Soon there would be no more private healthcare; it would all be provided by the state, with the same for everyone; and education for the sons of bricklayers would be as good as for the sons of dukes. Sometimes to get out of the wood you have to pass through the brambles. That’s what I told myself any time I began to doubt.

  There was a police notice on the front of Lorelei’s house, warning people not to enter, but no one was around to enforce it. Once again, I stole in through the back gate. In the dusk the garden seemed different – thicker and danker as I trod through finger-like tugging weeds and over mounds of earth to the kitchen door.

  I didn’t dare turn on the lights when I got in, so the house stayed hidden from me, until, slowly, my eyes adjusted to the weak glow from the streetlights outside. I slipped silently through the hall and up the damp stairs, and I couldn’t help but open the door to the bathroom, to see stagnant pools of water on the floor. Even though I knew Lorelei’s body was long gone, my stomach twisted when I gazed at the copper bath, before my eyes rose to the gilt mirror on the opposite wall. And then, as my heart began to beat faster, I tried to picture someone in the dark glass, to bring the memories back. Something began to form.

  A sound made me stop: creaking from somewhere in the house. I froze, nervously trying to hear; all I could make out, though, was the wind outside and a draught through the cracks. After a while, not moving a muscle, I decided that it had only been the house settling, but I knew I shouldn’t spend any longer here than was necessary, so I hurried out to find Hazel’s bedroom in order to collect what I had come for.

  One of three on the upper floor, Hazel’s bedroom was pleasant and airy despite the gloom. She liked books, I could see from her shelves. They were filled with a mixture of classics – Dickens, the Brontës, Louisa May Alcott – and the sort of girlish romances that I used to read at her age. If I had been there any other time, seeing this would have made me smile – to know that, when it came down to it, each generation was just like the last. But the circumstances hardly allowed for sentimentality.

  There was a desk and a chair that she had covered in a velvet throw. I pulled the chair underneath the wide brass light fitting and stood on it to reach. Just as Hazel had told me, the fitting unscrewed. It came away quite easily, hanging from the cable, to leave a roughly cut hole in the ceiling. I stretched up so that I could see into the cavity above it and gingerly, worried about what I might find, slipped my hand inside. I felt about until I touched something smooth, something that moved as I probed it. Reaching further, I managed to twist it out.

  A white box made of card lay in my hands, looking quite plain, quite unremarkable, yet I couldn’t help but hope that this was the key to how and why Lorelei had died. The key to getting Nick released.

  It was about the size of a dinner plate, ten centimetres tall, without a single mark on it to denote its contents. I lifted the lid. It tipped up to reveal that the box was divided into a dozen identical little segments – but, crushingly, whatever had once been in those compartments was now gone. The thing was empty and meaningless.

  I was about to cast it aside in anger when something struck me, though: a sense that there was something familiar about the box, something that I recognized. I was sure that I had seen one like it before. And yet I couldn’t think where.

  It had been years ago, I was sure of that – when I was younger, although not a child – but when? Where? I racked my brains trying to remember more.

  It was the clamour of a police-car bell outside that made me stop. Nervous, I eased back the curtain and looked out the window. The car came close to the house, charging through the ruts and black water, but continued straight past without slowing. It wasn’t coming here – but, my God, what they could do to us just with the sound of a bell.

  I returned to the box, weighing it in my hand and trying to picture another like it. I paced thoughtfully around Hazel’s room, surrounded by her books; the pictures on her wall; the soft pink ballet shoes tied to the back of her door; her navy school skirt and blouse slung over the back of a chair. I could have kicked myself for not being able to remember. The dank house,
it was as if it were taunting me. Then I halted and looked back at the chair.

  That uniform. I stared at it. And suddenly I was back in another time, a time when I had worn a muddy-brown uniform, my feet damp even through thick leather boots as thin rain drizzled down. Yet a thrill of excitement was running through me as I looked along the barrel of a bolt-action rifle. I and twenty other girls were all lined up for our Compulsory Basic at a run-down former naval base in Kent and I reached into a carton just like this one to lift out a round, before slotting it into the breach and squeezing the trigger. Then came the explosion and a kick into the muscle of my shoulder. Followed by the dark, distant hole appearing in the target.

  I held up the box, my mind churning, the speckled light making the white box a dull grey. Is that what it had held? Those little metal spears? And, if so, what the hell was Lorelei hiding them for? I couldn’t for a single second picture the beautiful actress who wore furs firing a weapon. The idea seemed wholly impossible.

  Of course, they could have been for someone else – but then, in a sense, it didn’t matter: whatever her purpose in storing them, it was placing us all in danger. Another creak from the house startled me and made me catch my breath.

  I put the box on the bed and stepped back on to the chair. Once more I reached into the void and patted my hand around to see if there was anything else up there. I felt nothing and was about to jump down when my fingers touched the corner of something hard. Stretching up, with my feet unsteady on the chair, I just managed to pull it out.

  It was a thin hardback book with plain leather covering, like a ledger I thought, and about the dimensions of a school exercise book. Curious, I opened it to find blocks of writing, but before I could examine them, I heard a violent metallic ringing from outside that told me the police car was coming back. I crept to the window with my heart in my mouth. The car was drawing closer, from the end of the street, then to within fifty metres, finally stopping abruptly on the other side of the road, a few houses up. I waited to see, trying to think if I could run – but where to? For a few moments nothing happened, then three plain-clothes officers jumped out and charged up to the nearest house, where they began hammering on a red door until it opened and they all rushed in. I felt relief. They hadn’t come for me, but I knew that I should leave.

  After replacing the light fitting, with my hands trembling a little, I went into Lorelei’s bedroom in search of a bag to hide what I had found. At the back of a wardrobe I found one with a stiff flat base inside. I tore away some of the thread and managed to slip the book between the base and the outer fabric. The box that I had taken was designed to fold flat, so that went in too. I dropped in my purse, handkerchief, and a silk scarf I found on the floor of the wardrobe to cover it all, put the bag over my shoulder and went out the back of the house, checking around carefully before hurrying away in the dark.

  As soon as it felt safe, I stopped walking. On the other side of the road a little corner café was still open and advertising fresh mutton in the stew, rather than the spam and corned beef that still made up the meat staple of our diet. It seemed a good place to sit for a while to examine what I had taken.

  I sat at a cracked table to order a tea, carefully lifted out the book and opened it to discover the pages were fine old paper, thick and creamy, thinly lined. I didn’t recognize the handwriting that appeared – it could have been Lorelei’s and I knew it wasn’t Nick’s, unless he had gone to some pains to disguise it. It was compact yet spiderishly untidy, and it made me wonder about the person who had made those little marks and dashes on the page – can you really tell someone’s personality from their handwriting? It seems a silly idea, and yet, as I traced the careless lines and reckless curls, they seemed to conjure the woman I presumed was their author. I pictured her rapidly scratching a pen across the surface of each page, with the doors locked and bolted to prevent anyone catching her. The writing filled page after page, but it was all in a strange form, nothing like what I had expected.

  6

  ‘Lucky old Democratic United Kingdom. All the best parts of London are over there,’ Nick said, peering through the wire fence, across the Thames to the fenced-in north-western sector and the American troops guarding its borders. ‘I always fancied myself as a bit of a boulevardier, you see. No chance of that now. Goodbye, Westminster, farewell, Buckingham Palace. Hello, Croydon.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘And hello, American soldiers too.’

  We were beside the wreck of Westminster Bridge – the first stop on a sightseeing tour upon which he was taking me that first day that we met.

  I looked through the fence too. The other side seemed very far away. ‘Were you in the army?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘D-Day?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘POW?’

  He dropped his cigarette and ground it underfoot. ‘In Belgium.’ I never knew what to say to men who had been through what he had been through. There were so many of them, and yet I was always lost for words. He didn’t want to talk about it either, it seemed, and instead gazed up at the huge grey battleship towering above us. ‘Do you know about the Archangel?’ he asked.

  Of course I did. Everyone knew about the iron angel that watched over London, with her searchlights sweeping the water of the Thames at night to prevent American spies coming over to our side. It was aboard her that the first Soviet troops had arrived in 1945. ‘Yes.’ I paused. Before we started chatting about the Archangel and all the other strange things that had fallen on London, there was something I needed to ask. Sally was always getting in trouble with married men, and it had made me cautious. ‘You’re not married, are you?’ I said.

  He hesitated before bursting out laughing. ‘Well, you’re direct. All right, the truth is I’m getting divorced, but it’s not yet final. And I have a daughter. She’s a lovely girl. Very sensitive. Not like her mother.’

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about all that. ‘You sound like you can’t wait for the divorce.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Is she that bad? What’s she like?’ I tried not to sound jealous.

  ‘An actress. She was a bit of a star for a couple of years.’

  ‘Fancy.’ I hated her.

  ‘Sometimes. But not me, I’m just your average family doctor.’

  ‘You’re not, though, are you?’ I said, meaning it. ‘Average, I mean.’

  ‘Well, who wants to be average?’ He thrust his hands in his pockets and suddenly he seemed like one of the boys I had had to tell off for making the others giggle in class. ‘Right, well, let’s head for Covent Garden. Scene of drunks and reprobates for four hundred years.’

  ‘All right.’

  We spent the day wandering around Covent Garden, watching the musicians and Punch and Judy shows. The big theatre there was once Britain’s finest opera house, Nick told me. Now it sported mass entertainment for the workers’ tastes – vaudeville acts, gay singers and slapstick comedy. We arrived back at Waterloo Station as the sun was setting but didn’t say much – we were a bit too thoughtful, I think. I climbed up to the carriage and leaned out the window.

  ‘I would like to see you again,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. I genuinely couldn’t understand why someone like him would be interested in someone like me.

  ‘Kindred spirit,’ he said.

  7

  Checking to make sure that the waitress was in the café kitchen, I flicked quickly through Lorelei’s book. It was written in watery ink, spread through twenty-odd sections. Each section was separated from the next by a blank page. Each had two columns. The first was a column of strings of two letters followed by thirteen digits. The second was a column of three-letter strings.

  The first section in the book had four lines. They remained throughout the book, but more lines were added from time to time, growing to seven lines in the final section:

  DD2261033445298 wfn

  VN1081209994632 str cor

  TW3284408109028 pro wfn
/>   AM7126026369346 cor

  VN4653310089328 cor str

  DO5574301038201 wfn pro

  TL2159414038033 nor

  Throughout the book, the first column of letters and numbers would always be complete, but sometimes the second column would be blank.

  I spent a long time trying to guess what it could all mean, but in the end I could make nothing of it other than that Lorelei had had something to hide and had gone to some effort to do so.

  I suppose I have never had the sort of mind suited to deciphering codes: I was the very last person you would describe as devious, I just tended to take things at face value. It made me a pushover for my pupils, of course: if they had failed to complete their homework or turned up late, I would believe any excuse if it were told with an honest-looking face.

  It would take some puzzling over – and Hazel was waiting at home for me, I reminded myself. So I placed the book back into Lorelei’s bag and set off for home. I would try to decipher it there.

  Outside, I kept up a good pace despite the smog and it wasn’t long before I caught sight of our house. It seemed like a sanctuary now, and it was a relief just to come within a hundred paces of it. With Lorelei’s secrets in my possession, Nick might soon be back with us, I told myself.

  As I drew close, a beam of light from the front window pierced the mist and I saw my two-year-old ginger cat, Julius, sitting neatly on the step, watching my approach. His amber eyes blinked at me but he jumped up and bounded away when a noise spooked him. I glanced around to see a vehicle coming to a stop behind me: a delivery van with its passenger door open. A man got out, silhouetted by the van’s headlights. ‘Jane Cawson?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, taken aback and worried by the thought of who he might be.

  He took me forcefully by the arm and pulled me around to the back of the vehicle. ‘Come on, be a good girl.’