‘I will.’ I slipped the receiver back into its cradle. ‘Why did you answer that?’ I called out to Tibbot.
He came back into the hallway. ‘You were outside; I thought it might be about your husband and you wouldn’t want to miss the call. Mrs Cawson, you asked to speak to me. I can go if you don’t want me here.’
I relented. ‘No, I’m sorry. Please stay.’ But I couldn’t shake off the fact that I knew nothing about where his loyalties lay.
‘Can I ask who that was?’ Tibbot said as we went back into the parlour.
‘Is it important?’
‘It could be.’
‘Charles O’Shea. Nick’s secretary.’
‘Right,’ he said. He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was nearly half past nine. ‘Well, there’s something else we have to think about.’
‘What’s that?’
He brushed something unseen from his brow. ‘It’s that I’m not sure how much time we have. You see, I don’t know how to put this, but NatSec… sometimes people hang themselves in those cells.’ My heart thumped and he paused as I struggled with the idea. ‘If that were to happen, the case would be closed with his name on it. It’s a tick in their records.’ I had been picturing Nick before a military tribunal. Now, in a moment of panic, I saw him buried.
I couldn’t be sure that I could trust this man. I didn’t know why he was helping me. But I had to know what Lorelei had been involved in.
‘There’s something I need to show you,’ I said.
‘Cryptography,’ Tibbot muttered, flicking over the pages of the book I had retrieved from Lorelei’s house. The white box I had found sat beside it on the table; it had meant nothing to him, and I hadn’t let him into my suspicion that it had contained rifle rounds, for fear that he would immediately wash his hands of us. ‘From the Greek krypto, meaning “hidden thing”. It’s NatSec’s department, really, not the police’s.’
I was surprised by his knowledge of Greek. He was a working-class Londoner and not many of them had been to the sort of school that taught Classics. Maybe I had been jumping to conclusions.
‘So do you know anything about it?’
He scratched his white-bristled chin. ‘We’ve had a few pointers in CID. There’ll be a key – a set of numbers or letters. If you have it, it’s easy to decode. If you don’t, you have to look for patterns.’
‘I don’t think we’ve got it.’
‘No.’ We peered at the book again. The strings of letters and numbers varied only occasionally between its twenty-odd sections. ‘Might as well start here,’ Tibbot said, tapping the final section. I slid my finger down the page through the first column of two letters followed by a series of numbers.
DD2261033445298 wfn
VN1081209994632 str cor
TW3284408109028 pro wfn
AM7126026369346 cor
VN4653310089328 cor str
DO5574301038201 wfn pro
TL2159414038033 nor
Two of the seven strings began with VN. ‘That’s a start,’ I said hopefully. ‘A way in.’
‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘Our best shot, anyhow.’ He didn’t sound very positive.
We tried making phrases from the letters, turning them around and thinking of names for which they could be the initials. But half an hour later we were no further on. ‘What if we’re going at this the wrong way? What if it’s not a code?’ I said.
‘I’ve been thinking about that. They could be identification numbers, say, but for what? Phone numbers are seven digits, including the exchange code. Identity cards have three letters at the beginning of the number.’
‘Bank notes?’ The new decimal currency still felt strange to many of us.
He pulled a pound note from his wallet and examined it. ‘No. Nothing like it.’
‘Map reference?’
‘They’re much shorter.’
We sat reading the numbers backwards and forwards. I saw them spinning in the air, but it did no good. It drove me mad to think that these marks on a page might tell us who was responsible for Lorelei’s death and – more importantly – why it wasn’t Nick. But no matter how much I stared at them, all they did was mock me with their impenetrability.
Then, as Tibbot went to the kitchen to draw a glass of water, I suddenly had a thought. ‘I know where I’ve seen something like this,’ I said, jumping up. ‘At school.’
‘What do you mean?’ he said, coming back in.
I was overjoyed at the thought that we might now have it – we might be able to decode what she had been writing. ‘Library codes. To identify books.’
He nodded thoughtfully. ‘Library codes. Yes. Could be. Where’s your nearest library?’
‘Southwark.’
‘Better get there soon. If it’s open at all, it’ll probably close early for Liberation Day,’ he said.
We copied the codes on to a small slip of paper and put the book back in its hiding place. I had a hurried word with Hazel – with what was going on now, I thought it best if she went to a friend’s house and she reluctantly agreed to go. She had a key and could let herself back in for supper that evening.
Leaving the house after seeing her off, I saw a figure at the window of the house next door. She was perhaps twenty-two and dressed in a plain blouse and trousers cut like those you had to wear in the army, and her appearance made me suddenly very nervous. It must have shown, because Tibbot discreetly asked who she was.
‘Patricia. Our neighbour. She’s in the Party.’
‘Serious about it?’
‘Very. Nick told me to watch what I said around her.’ This slip of a girl could be as dangerous as the men who beat on your door in the night. So strange that raw muscle power – the power of men – was being quietly supplanted by the power of a whisper behind hands, a force that we women were better at employing.
Tibbot took my arm. ‘Well, try to keep calm,’ he said. ‘Don’t attract attention. Smile. Look around you. Stop to button up your coat. Just think of it as a normal day.’
He was right, of course: what we were undertaking was dangerous enough without doing anything to signal that we were engaged in something that made us nervous. After all, we were probably the only people in the city that day not happily getting ready to celebrate the arrival of the ship that had fired the first Soviet shot against the Germans.
‘Right. Yes,’ I said, and I did my best to smile.
13
I don’t remember the journey home with Nick from the Comintern party at the hotel, the moment when he, Charles and Lorelei had stared as the world had seemed to fall to pieces around me.
He gave me a sedative when we got in and told me not to say anything, simply to sleep and we would talk about it in the morning. I couldn’t have spoken if I had tried. He stroked my head and wiped my cheeks dry, and I felt warmth spread over me like a blanket as the memory of what had happened that evening melted away. It was something that had happened to someone else.
I have images of the days that came after; but nothing is clear now. Just Nick sitting patiently by my side. But there is a memory I do have, distinct in my mind, of a time when I woke up and he wasn’t there. It was an afternoon and I heard a woman’s voice downstairs, strong and clear. I lifted myself out of bed and rubbed my clammy skin. I wasn’t sure how long I had been asleep. Opening the door just a crack, I heard the voice again.
‘…anything I can do for her?’
‘No, no. I don’t think there’s much anyone can do. Time. That’s all.’
‘Yes, that’s right. You’re still coming for Hazel on Sunday?’