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  ‘Just once. At a party.’ I couldn’t help but think of that night as I put the letters back in the desk.

  ‘She told me that I could do anything. That I would be more beautiful than her.’ She tried to smile but it didn’t work. ‘She said people would write films just for me to star in them.’

  ‘It’s going to happen,’ I said, stroking her cheek and hoping a real smile would come. But her expression changed to confusion.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’ A note of suspicion, of faint mistrust.

  ‘It’s nothing. I just need to find something.’

  ‘Is it to help Dad?’

  ‘Yes. I think it will help.’

  ‘I’ll do it with you.’ She probably just wanted something to take her mind away from her mother for a short while.

  ‘There’s no need.’ I was sorry to push her away, but I couldn’t involve a child in this. I sat in Nick’s chair; it shook slightly. ‘And it’s not always safe to go poking around in the past.’

  ‘That’s what you’re doing,’ she insisted.

  ‘Yes. But I know what I’m getting into.’

  ‘All right.’ She looked down and her eyes teared up again before she left. Poor girl.

  There was nothing else in the desk. I even searched it for secret compartments, which some of these old desks have. After that, I took a look inside the boxes lining the walls, which proved to be full of medical records. Perhaps the reason that the Secs had arrested Nick had nothing to do with Lorelei after all, and the reason really lay in these records – a powerful patient with a secret illness, or someone who had died when he shouldn’t have done – but they may as well have been written in a foreign language for all that I understood of them.

  I moved back to the desk and hesitated, far from sure that I was doing the right thing, but I gripped the tarnished brass handle on the bottom drawer and pulled it towards me, lifting the letters out again. As I did so, I noticed something new. The bottom of the drawer felt different to the others – papery where the others had been smooth wood. I pulled it out entirely and turned it upside down, to find that what I had thought was the bottom was, in fact, a sheet of white paper cut to perfectly fit the base. It fluttered out and fell to the floor; and with it fell a photograph.

  I recognized the pair in that picture, their faces displaying happy and confident expressions that seemed to say the sun would never dim. But it would one day. And I saw too that Nick and Lorelei weren’t alone. They stood beside a car, an expensive open-roofed one, and at the wheel sat a pale woman with her black hair tied back. All three had wine glasses in their hands, seemingly toasting something. Across the bottom, in Lorelei’s handwriting, were the words, ‘To a brighter future!’ I pondered them. Such optimism and confidence, but it wasn’t high hopes for the state – no, this was a private affair. There was something between them that they thought was going to work out well.

  I knocked on Hazel’s door. ‘Come in,’ she said.

  ‘How’s the radio show?’ She shrugged. ‘Well, I hope it’s nice. I have to ask you something. Do you remember your parents ever having this car?’ I said, showing the photograph. She had been crying and I wanted to comfort her, but I had to keep on with what I was doing. Time could be short.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘It’s nothing. Do you recognize this woman, maybe?’

  Hazel looked at me with curiosity and took the photograph. ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen her at our house, I think. But I don’t know who she is.’

  ‘Do you remember anything about her?’

  ‘No, it was a few years ago.’ She looked bemused that I would ask about such trivial matters at a time like this. ‘Jane, what’s going to happen about my mum? The funeral.’ She stuttered over the final word. It was heart-breaking.

  I sat on her bed. She had a scrapbook open, displaying articles cut from the Morning Star. Each was a story or photograph about Lorelei in the years after Victory 1945. There was even a grainy picture of her meeting the First Secretary outside the gala premiere for one of her films – the art historian Anthony Blunt loved the highest forms of art, but he also understood the reach of the lower ones. The power of giving people a narrative to live through.

  ‘I don’t know. I think we can arrange that in a few days’ time. Your dad will do it later.’ I tried to make it sound like I had no doubt he would be back soon.

  ‘OK.’

  I leafed through the scrapbook. ‘These are about your mum, aren’t they?’ I noticed that the stories about Lorelei stopped abruptly in 1948, even though there was still space left in the book. That must have been when she disappeared from view.

  ‘Yeah.’

  I had to ask her again about the photograph from her father’s desk, though. ‘So this woman was at your house.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Do you –’

  The sound of knocking on the front door, rapid and demanding, made me stop. Cautiously, I went downstairs to answer it. I didn’t know who it would be. I just hoped to God it wasn’t the Secs.

  The second I turned the latch, however, Detective Sergeant Tibbot entered without a word. He waited until the door had closed behind him and indicated I should lock it firmly. Then he spoke.

  ‘There are some things you don’t talk about on the phone.’

  12

  The look on Tibbot’s face as he entered the house was serious. He came close. ‘Do you know all your neighbours by sight?’

  ‘All the immediate ones, yes.’

  ‘Seen anyone new?’

  ‘No.’

  We went into the parlour. ‘Your husband is still in Great Queen Street,’ he said. ‘They’re accusing him of killing his ex-wife.’ I felt the air rush out of me. I wanted to cry out that it wasn’t possible, but he wasn’t finished. ‘I’m sorry to say that’s worse than you think.’

  My voice caught in my throat. ‘How?’ I stammered.

  ‘Do you remember when I saw you at the location of the incident, your husband told me he had been on a call at a patient’s house when the death occurred?’

  ‘Yes.’ I could tell what was coming. Nick had lied. He had been at Lorelei’s after all. Somehow I hadn’t seen him.

  ‘Well, you see –’

  I heard Hazel’s door open. Tibbot halted abruptly.

  ‘Hazel?’ I called up the stairs.

  ‘Yes?’

  I went to the foot of the staircase. She was on the landing above. ‘Someone has come to see me, to help make sure your dad is OK,’ I told her. ‘It’s very important that I speak to him. Could you do something for me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Could you stay in your room while he’s here? It won’t be for too long.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, although she looked unhappy as she went back to her room.

  ‘Is that his daughter?’ Tibbot asked when I returned.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He paused in thought for a moment, then shook himself out of it. ‘Well, as I was saying, I checked with the man concerned, Comrade Taggan, this morning just after I called you. NatSec hadn’t spoken to him. He claimed that Dr Cawson came for over an hour, conducted his consultation and left. No one else was there.’

  I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Nick’s story was true – he hadn’t been with Lorelei and he had had nothing to do with her death. And yet Tibbot looked severe. ‘But that’s good,’ I insisted. ‘It proves it, doesn’t it?’

  He hesitated. ‘No, I’m afraid that’s the problem. Because your husband told NatSec exactly the same thing. And they haven’t bothered to check.’ It slowly dawned on me what he was saying. ‘It means that they want him to be found guilty whether or not he actually did it.’

  I gasped. Despite the fire, the room was freezing. ‘But why?’

  He cleared his throat, uncomfortable with having to bear such news. ‘There could be ten different reasons: they think somehow he did it; or they’re under pressure to find someone – anyone – to blame
for it and he’ll do; or just incompetence. But I don’t think it’s any of those. I think it’s because they want him for something else they seem to think he has done. Mrs Cawson, NatSec investigates crimes against the state.’ His voice dropped and his eyes found mine. ‘You know what that means.’

  I did. It meant a military court and the rope. I groped for the chair and felt Tibbot’s hand under my shoulder, holding me and leading me to it. I fell on to the seat and wiped the sweat from my brow. ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled.

  ‘You’ll be all right. Do you have anybody you want to contact?’

  I thought of my parents, long gone. ‘No.’

  I couldn’t understand what was happening. I had hoped, when I rang the station earlier, that he would tell me that Nick was coming home in an hour or that the Secs were dragging their heels and it might even be a day or two before he was back, but that he would come. The idea that Nick might actually be charged, and that NatSec were after him because they believed he and Lorelei were involved in crimes of subversion, was devastating. ‘Maybe he’s innocent,’ I insisted. ‘They must be wrong.’ But there was what I had found at Lorelei’s house.

  He sat down and looked at me closely. ‘Mrs Cawson, are you political?’

  I knew what he meant. It was a very dangerous question to be asked by any official: did we harbour ideas that the state deemed troublesome? ‘No. We’re not.’ There was a pause.

  ‘All right.’

  Without wanting to, I pictured life without Nick – sitting alone in the house, Hazel in one of the awful communal schools for the children of dissidents. And I thought of the family I would never have with him. Such a sterile and bleak existence, devoid of the brightness and excitement and the hard-to-explain sense of things to come that he had brought to my life just half a year ago.

  ‘What can we do?’ I asked. Maybe there was a way to show that Nick had had nothing to do with Lorelei’s death; and that, even if she had been subversive, he hadn’t. Tibbot looked uncomfortable. I realized I had said ‘we’ as if he were going to help me. There was no reason that he would. ‘Thank you for coming. You’re putting yourself at risk just being here,’ I said. ‘If they found out you had been talking to me like this, it wouldn’t be good for you, would it?’

  ‘No, not good.’ He stood up and went to the drinks cabinet. There was a bottle of vodka and a small bottle of scotch. ‘Whisky. Don’t often see it. May I?’

  ‘Please. I think it was a gift from a patient.’ It was very early to be drinking.

  He poured himself a small glass and drank it thoughtfully. There was something melancholy about the way he did it. ‘His daughter,’ he said into his glass.

  ‘Hazel.’

  He kept staring into the drink. ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Fourteen.’ Forgive me for hoping that her vulnerability would help turn his mind.

  He rubbed his brow and drank again, before staring back into the glass. I began to understand his air of sadness. ‘Do you have –’

  ‘She died.’ There was a long silence before he went on. ‘In ’47. When things weren’t like now. Less stable.’

  ‘What happened?’

  He shook his head and poured a little more into his glass. It looked like an action he had performed many times. ‘If he’s gone, what happens to her?’ he asked.

  ‘I have no idea,’ I said, truthfully. ‘Lorelei’s mother is alive, but she’s old. She can’t look after a child.’

  He drank for the last time and put down the glass. He remained quiet for a while. ‘If we find that he is working against the state, will you drop it?’ he asked.

  There was a long pause while I thought of what it would be like if that turned out to be true. ‘Yes. I suppose I would have to,’ I said. There would be no point going on. He would be lost no matter what I did and it would only make things worse for Hazel and myself. I hoped to God it wouldn’t come to that. ‘They questioned me too, last night,’ I said.

  He stopped. ‘The Secs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I described how they had shoved me into a wire cage in the back of one of their foul vans.

  ‘You got off lightly,’ he said, after thinking it over. ‘I’ve heard some of what goes on in their HQ. The cells below.’ He shook his head. ‘Though that officer, Grest, I’ve come across him before. From what I hear, if you’d given him a tenner he would’ve let you walk. I would try that next time.’ He sat down. ‘Does your husband often make house calls?’

  ‘Sometimes. Why?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just that this Comrade Taggan went into work that day, after your husband went to see him.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, I thought doctors only make house calls for people who are too ill to get out.’

  ‘I expect if they’re very important, Nick will go to them.’

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right. Could anyone else verify your husband’s whereabouts? His secretary?’

  ‘I doubt it. Charles doesn’t go on calls with him.’ I gazed at him. ‘Do you know yet how she died?’

  ‘The force medical officer said at the scene that it looked to him like drowning – no injuries on her – but he couldn’t be certain until he had the body back at the morgue.’ I shivered at the harsh image.

  ‘And what did he say then?’

  ‘Nothing. By then NatSec had taken over. So I don’t know any more than you on that score.’

  ‘Wasn’t it just an accident?’ I appealed to him. ‘There was that Champagne bottle next to her. So she was drinking and slipped in the bath.’ If someone could prove that it had been just an accident, they would have to release Nick – unless, that is, they could find evidence that he had been involved in subversion. If he had been involved with a dissident group – maybe even one of those encouraged by the Americans – it would be a very serious situation.

  Tibbot sounded sceptical. ‘Well, it happens – someone falls and knocks their head. But there wasn’t a mark on her. And her eyes open like that … Strange.’

  ‘So what do you think?’ I was just desperate for something to hold on to. It was like he was playing with me, holding out the prospect of an innocent explanation that would give Nick his freedom, then pulling it back.

  ‘Well, I think we need to know two things: first, why NatSec want your husband, and, second, why his former wife died. You can put money on it that one will tell us the other. Was she political?’

  ‘I don’t think so, but I only met her once.’

  ‘Did she make any political statements?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. Not that I heard, anyway.’ That evening I had met her, and the letters of hers that I had read, had left me with the impression that she was, by nature, interested in little more than her own world, floating above the rest.

  ‘Can you remember anything else about the scene of death that you didn’t say before?’ Tibbot asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘There must be something. Think.’

  ‘There isn’t!’ And in a moment it all hit home. I needed air.

  I ran out of the room, out the back door, and stood sucking in the air, damp as it was, in an attempt to cool my brain. In a neighbouring garden a little boy was kicking a football around, shouting to an unseen friend about the tally of goals between them. The friend yelled back at the same childish volume.

  I calmed myself down and looked towards the house. This man, Tibbot – I knew nothing about him. Should I be telling him so much? For all I knew, he would report it all straight back to NatSec. It was a risk. But I thought it over a hundred ways and each time I decided that, no matter how dangerous it was, I had little choice. I needed to help Nick and I couldn’t do that alone, I needed someone who had been in such a maze before and could guide me through.

  Still, I hadn’t yet told him about the book and carton I had found at Lorelei’s house, and I decided to hold off for now until I was a little bit more certain about him.

  The boys nearby shouted again as one of them seem
ed to score a goal and, after another minute getting my breath back, I returned.

  The second I stepped back inside, however, a sight made me stop dead. Tibbot was standing with the hall telephone in his hand. I imagined the line running straight to NatSec. ‘Who are you calling?’ I demanded.

  ‘No one,’ he replied, taken aback by my tone. ‘Someone’s called you.’

  I snatched the receiver out of his hand. ‘Nick?’ I said urgently.

  I glanced up the stairs towards Hazel’s room. The sound of the radio news was drifting down: ‘… since the Republic erected a barrier to prevent residents of north-west London from looting our stores for low-priced but excellent-quality food …’

  ‘Mrs Cawson?’ came the cautious reply. ‘It’s Charles O’Shea.’

  It wasn’t Nick. Shattered, I dropped the receiver and walked away. I didn’t care how I must have appeared to Tibbot as he picked up the handset from the floor. ‘Can I help you?’ he muttered into it. I leaned against the wall as Charles’s voice buzzed from the other end. Tibbot looked over at me and covered the mouthpiece. ‘He wants to speak to you.’

  I reached for it. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, recovering a little. ‘Hello, Charles.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘A policeman.’

  ‘You’re with a policeman?’

  I glanced at Tibbot. He went into the parlour. ‘It’s fine. You can speak.’

  ‘Dr Cawson is still where he was?’ he asked.

  Tibbot had warned me that there were certain things you didn’t talk about on the telephone and Charles too was being guarded. ‘Yes. It doesn’t seem to be changing.’

  ‘Is there any more information? Regarding his former wife?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I understand.’ He paused. ‘I tried my contacts in the Party; they are looking into it for me.’

  ‘Of course.’ I suspected now that if he really did have any friends in the Party, they were on the lowest rung of the ladder.

  ‘I’ll continue to keep the practice running as best I can. I would, of course, appreciate it if you could keep me informed about any developments.’

  ‘I will.’ I slipped the receiver back into its cradle. ‘Why did you answer that?’ I called out to Tibbot.