We were going to start with Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina before she could recover her poise. And me and Lesley would do it, so we could escalate up to Nightingale if necessary.
Nightingale eyed our less-than-enthusiastic faces.
‘I’ll ensure that more coffee is laid on,’ he said.
‘Can I have a taser as well?’ asked Lesley, but Nightingale said no.
Varvara Sidorovna sat on the other side of the interview desk dressed in the cheap white T-shirt and grey jogging bottoms that have become the uniform of shame now that we’re no longer allowed to put our suspects in paper suits. There were no tapes in the double cassette recorder and while Essex Police might be taping the output of the CCTV camera mounted in a red perspex bubble above our heads, this was officially an unofficial interview. This had become our standard procedure, a chance for us and our interviewee to discuss issues that neither of us particularly wanted on the record.
‘Can you state your full name please?’ asked Lesley.
‘Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina.’
‘And your date of birth?’
‘November the twenty-first 1921,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘In Kryukovo, Russia.’ Which I found, when I looked it up afterwards, was now part of the sprawling Moscow suburb of Zelenograd and, incidentally, the closest the Germans got to the capital during the Second World War.
‘Did you serve in the Soviet Army during the war?’ I asked.
‘365th Special Regiment. I was a lieutenant,’ she said, ‘not a major. Is the Nightingale going to show his face at some point?’
‘He’s about,’ said Lesley.
‘I’d heard rumours about him, but I’d always thought they were exaggerations. Man, he’s something.’ Varvara Sidorovna grinned and suddenly looked eighteen and fresh off the wheat fields. ‘I’ve never met anyone that fast with that much control before. No wonder the fascists put a price on his head.’
It’s important when interviewing a suspect to stay focused on what’s broadly relevant to the investigation, but even so it took a great deal of self-control not to ask about that. I suspected that should we manage to bang her up in Holloway prison, Lieutenant Tamonina was going to have Professor Postmartin as a frequent visitor.
Who would no doubt also ask for more detail about her training, her wartime operations and her capture near Brynsk in January 1943.
‘I didn’t tell them who I was,’ she said. ‘The fascists had orders to shoot us on sight, so I pretended to be a medic.’ Even then she barely survived the initial abuse at the hands of her captors — we didn’t ask for details and she didn’t volunteer any. She didn’t dare use magic to escape because by that point in the war the Germans had started to deploy their own practitioners to counter the Night Witches.
‘They had these men they called werewolves,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘Who were said to be able to sniff out anyone using the craft.’
‘Were they really werewolves,’ I asked. ‘Shape-shifters?’
‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘We had intelligence reports that their capabilities were real. But I never encountered one, so I don’t know if they were truly men who became wolves or not.’
She was drafted as slave labour as part of Organisation Todt and found herself, much to her own surprise, in the Channel Islands. ‘They said we were on British soil,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. ‘For the first few days I thought Britain had been invaded, but one of the other prisoners explained that these were British islands that were closer to France than England.’ There were a couple of werewolves on the Island of Alderney, where the concentration camps were, but there were none on Guernsey where she was transferred in order to be worked to death building gun emplacements. But as soon as they were clear of the harbour, she knocked down one of the guards at the end of the marching column and escaped in the confusion.
‘It’s not like the Great Escape or Colditz,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t hang around setting up escape committees or any of that nonsense. Any moment of the day some pig-faced guard might just shoot you in the head for the joy of it — you took your opportunities as soon as you could.’
Varvara Sidorovna cheerfully admitted that she’d been totally prepared to off some locals to make good her escape, but fortunately for everyone concerned, except the Germans, she was spotted by an old lady and guided into the arms of the resistance.
‘They called me Vivien,’ she said, after the actress, and provided her with false papers. ‘And taught me to speak English with my beautiful proper English accent.’
After Liberation in 1945 she made her way to London with her new English name and identity and parlayed that into an official identity in the general post-war confusion. She said she got married in 1952 but refused to give any details about her husband.
‘But in any case he died in 1963,’ she said.
They lived in a semi off the High Street in Wimbledon. There were no children.
‘You’re very well preserved for a woman in her mid-nineties,’ said Lesley.
‘You noticed,’ said Varvara Sidorovna turning her head and striking a pose.
‘Do you know why?’ asked Lesley.
Varvara Sidorovna leant forward. ‘I discovered the elixir of youth,’ she said. ‘In an Oxfam shop in Twickenham.’
‘Are you sure it wasn’t Help the Aged?’ I asked, about a millisecond before Lesley could — she booted me under the table in revenge.
Varvara Sidorovna waited patiently for us to behave ourselves.
‘Was it something you did to yourself?’ asked Lesley.
‘God, no,’ she said. ‘One day I was getting older and the next day I wasn’t.’
So Nightingale wasn’t the only one, I thought.
‘Can you remember roughly what year it happened?’ I asked.
‘August Bank Holiday 1966,’ she said.
‘That’s a very precise date,’ said Lesley.
‘I have a very clear memory of it happening,’ said Varvara Sidorovna. She’d still been living in the house in Wimbledon and she’d been hanging up washing in her back garden.
‘It was as if someone had opened a door into summer,’ she said. ‘I felt suddenly filled up with’ — she waved her hands around vaguely — ‘honey, sunlight, flowers. When I went to bed I dreamt in Russian for the first time in years. I wanted to go dancing and I wanted to get laid really, really badly. The next day there were thunderstorms.’
‘So you knew you were getting younger?’ asked Lesley.
Varvara Sidorovna laughed. ‘No, dear,’ she said. ‘I thought I was having the menopause.’ When it became obvious she wasn’t, she decided to take advantage.
‘I went out dancing and got laid and very, very drunk,’ she said. And then she moved to Notting Hill, experimented with LSD and listened to far too much progressive rock than was good for her. ‘Take my advice and never try casting a spell while listening to Hawkwind,’ she said. ‘Or when you’re on acid.’
‘How were you earning a living?’ asked Lesley.
‘You could drift in those days, there were squats and communes and groovy friends. People were always setting up co-operatives, bands and experimental theatre groups. I worked at Time Out magazine although that might have been later on — there’s a couple of years I’ve lost track of, 1975 in particular.’
‘When did you meet Albert Woodville-Gentle?’ I asked — the original Faceless Man had dropped out of sight in the early 1970s so it was possible they might have met then.
‘Much later,’ she said. ‘That was in 2003.’
Varvara Sidorovna was already firmly back in the demi-monde by that time.
‘You two must know what it’s like by now,’ she said. ‘Once you know it exists it’s always there in the corner of your eye. Plus I wanted to see if it was possible to go home, to Russia.’ She knew that most of her old wartime comrades would be dead, those that hadn’t been killed by the Germans were most likely liquidated by Stalin. She was a little surprised to find that the Nauchno-Issledovatelskiy Institut Neobychnyh Yavleniy, the Scientific Research Institute for Unusual Phenomena had been revived and that they even had agents operating in the West.