For a minute I remained still, hearing nothing. And then, with a rush of blood through my mind, I understood what I had missed.
I grabbed the stack of intimate letters from Lorelei that Nick had kept in his desk drawer. There was something in one that I needed to read again. I hunted through the lines about parties and acerbic comments about social climbers and fusty old men; declarations of love and laughing rejections of Nick’s ‘slushy’ replies; and finally I found the letter in which she mentioned the American wartime colonel who had asked her about the Reds embedding themselves in British society. I pulled it out and scanned it. The name I was looking for was there in blue ink, as dark as when she had written it.
I looked hard at the box – I had seen others like it far more recently than during my Compulsory Basic. Maybe this letter could save Nick. If I were right, he was guilty of a crime, but it was nothing like what the Secs thought.
23
The League of World Nations has condemned an attempt by the so-called Democratic United Kingdom to hijack its proceedings yesterday. The truly democratic nations of the world, led by the Soviet Union, Jugoslavia and China, threw out a motion attempting to blame the Republic of Great Britain for the division of the British island. The democratic states refused to relinquish the microphone in the assembly chamber until the motion was withdrawn. They were roundly applauded by all the countries present.
I took the Tube to the Aldwych. From there, I walked to the brass-studded front door of 60 Great Queen Street, a huge, faceless old building made of white stone blocks. I must have looked out of place and deathly nervous – the people freely entering this building were rarely civilians. After being searched, I was allowed inside to find a wide and tall lobby, plain to the point of austerity, where the reception desk was behind a thick glass window – thick enough to withstand a shot from a pistol, perhaps. I touched Lorelei’s letter to Nick, held in my pocket, to confirm to myself that it was there. It was what I trusted to get me out of there safely.
As I approached the thick glass, a young woman in uniform glanced up at me without interest before returning to the paperwork she was involved with. There were four forms, each with two carbon copies, and she seemed to be filling them all out simultaneously with the same information. Twelve copies of that report to be sent through the offices of government, some to be looked at and ignored, some to be acted upon, some to be binned, some to be filed unread. I waited. ‘Yes?’ she mouthed after a while.
I pressed myself to the glass. ‘My husband, Nicholas Cawson, is here. You… you suspect him of a crime.’ A young man in a uniform that was too small for him was standing right behind me, making no attempt to hide the fact that he was listening.
‘Yes?’ the woman repeated.
‘May I speak to someone?’
‘About what?’ asked the young man.
‘I have some information.’
‘Have you?’ He sounded intrigued and a little pleased with himself. The woman, seeing someone else take the burden of dealing with me, opened a file and extracted another ream of forms that she began to fill out. ‘You’ve done the right thing coming to us.’
It dawned on me that he thought I had come to provide information against Nick. I was about to tell him he was wrong, but it was more likely that I would have a hearing if I went along with his mistake. He took a key and let himself through a door in the wall, reappearing behind the glass partition. ‘Your name?’
‘Jane Cawson.’ I spelled it out.
‘And your husband’s?’
‘Nicholas Cawson.’ He glanced at the scratch on my cheek that the bird had made. I put my hand to it. He didn’t seem too interested, though, and wrote our two names on a piece of paper before going to the back of the reception desk to look through some cards. ‘Wait over there,’ he said, picking up a telephone and pointing to a line of chairs bolted to the floor.
On the wall was a poster of a man in a narrow alleyway, a shadow obscuring his face. ‘Saboteur. Parasite. Black marketeer. You THINK he is your friend, but he is working against you. Report counter-social behaviour. No matter who it is.’ There was a telephone number and I wondered how many people had called it – some proud to do their political duty, others ashamed and hoping no one would ever know.
I took the only available seat, next to an old man dressed in clothes that looked like they might once have been smart but were now torn and frayed. He had the air of someone who had felt his high hopes and ideals crushed out of him, and in between little sobs he opened a briefcase and pulled out what appeared to be pupils’ exercise books – distracting himself by reading over them. A teacher who had welcomed the arrival of Socialism with open arms, perhaps, only to find his syllabus restricted and his students staring at him as a relic to be eased out and forgotten.
After a while, the loudspeaker in the corner of the ceiling began to whine, then bark. It was time for Comrade Blunt’s address. ‘…banished superstition to the silvery pages of the history books. Our children will read of religion as they read of the Black Death – a terrible scourge that they will, thankfully, never encounter…’ He didn’t mention that his deceased father had been a vicar and he had been brought up a good Christian. Of course, Stalin had studied at a seminary, hadn’t he? Perhaps it was the constant immersion in these ideas that had resulted in their violent loathing. Churchill and Blunt fighting over us with words and ideals – it never seemed to end. And the letter in my pocket set out the price that we had paid for their warfare.
It must have been ten times over the course of the next hour that I got up to leave, before losing the courage even to walk out the door. Finally, I decided for certain that I was making a terrible mistake and picked up my bag to go. At that moment, however, a man strode into the room – bald, but quite handsome despite it, and my heart sank. Instantly I was back in that cage, the smog seeping into the dark van as we wound through traffic, the smell of his breath and sweat. I had hoped never to see Grest again, but my name must have been linked with his in the files. He stopped and looked around the lobby, then came over to me. ‘Mrs Cawson.’
I stared at him. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve–’
‘Come this way,’ he said, as he led me towards two doors guarded by Secs with gun holsters.
‘No, I was–’
‘Come this way.’
His shoes clipped on the floor as he recorded my entry at the guard post. In the corridors on the other side, everyone had the same look of grim determination, as if we were still at war and the enemy were expected to land at any moment. I had to keep up with his pace, until he stood back with formal politeness to let me enter a plain room. The door was thick enough to prevent any sound passing through it.
I sat at the small table, trying not to think of the other featureless rooms in this building and what took place in them. Somewhere, Nick sat or lay. If he knew I was there, he might have felt some comfort or simply more fear. ‘My husband,’ I said, trying to speak with strength but finding that strength dissolving.
‘Yes.’
‘He’s innocent.’ Grest just snorted. I could see he was wondering what my plan was. Simple pleading? Vehement denials? Supply some rumour about Nick’s friends in return for favour? He had probably heard it all a hundred times. ‘Well, he’s not entirely innocent. He’s committed a crime but it’s not what you think.’ Now he looked mildly interested. ‘You think he and Lorelei were working for the Americans. They weren’t. Please. Read this.’ I reached into my pocket and pulled out the letter I had taken from the stack in Nick’s writing desk. I didn’t want to think what would happen – to him, to me – if I were wrong.