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.