‘Yes.’
‘Stay to dinner?’
‘Thanks, but no, I should come straight back. I’m needed here.’
There was a pause. ‘Nick, I wanted to say something.’
‘About this?’
‘About something else.’
‘Oh, yes?’ he said.
‘It’s your choice, of course, but – Ian Fellowman. I saw you were angling for an introduction. You have heard about him, haven’t you?’
‘Heard what?’
‘He has a side to him.’
‘Meaning?’
She hesitated. ‘Well, I saw George Orwell – Eric – on the street just last month, walking past that restaurant that used to be Rules. I was meeting a chum there. I pointed him out and was about to call over because I hadn’t seen him for ages, but then Sabrina grabbed me and warned me off. It seems he was put in one of those re-education camps for that silly story he wrote about the animals. And it was Ian Fellowman who put him there.’ She paused again. ‘Darling, I’ve met real fanatics, and they don’t look like fanatics: their eyes don’t swivel or stand out on stalks; they just look like middle managers in off-the-peg suits. Really, I’m serious, Fellowman’s damn well toxic. You must watch yourself.’
‘Thanks for the warning.’
‘All right. Yes. Well, look, I really must make tracks.’ There was silence. I wondered why they weren’t speaking. ‘Do you think she’ll be all right? It’s a terrible thing to happen.’
‘She’s in a pretty bad state. I’ll go and check on her in a minute,’ he replied.
‘Yes. Do be kind. Cheerio.’
‘Goodbye.’
I returned to the bed. I didn’t want him to catch me listening. The creaks on the stairs told me he was coming up, and I pulled the bed sheets up to my chin as some sort of protection and waited. He gently pushed the door – I don’t know if it registered with him that it was ajar – and slipped into the room.
‘Oh, you’re awake,’ he said, sitting on the bed and taking my wrist. He laid his hand on my forehead. ‘How are you feeling?’ As he bent over me, I smelled that sweet perfume on him. The one she had held out to me on her wrist that night at the party. Tabac Blond.
‘I don’t know. Numb.’
‘Do you remember what happened? Why you have been unwell?’
I blinked. The question was awful. ‘Of course I remember.’ And then I was furious. I don’t know where it came from but I could have torn my hair out with the rage. ‘Do you think I could forget that? What are you… Are you mad?’ As I started to shout, he stood up and retreated to the wall, but remained facing me. I threw back the covers and looked down at my stomach. I had half expected to see some sort of evidence there. But there was nothing, no record. The child had been and gone without a mark on this world other than in my mind. Nick too just stared at the place where I would soon have been swelling.
‘Do you want some time alone?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ I couldn’t look at him. ‘Was that Lorelei?’
He hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘Why was she here?’ I was so bitter.
‘Just so–’
‘I don’t want her here again!’ All the anger I had was swept up into him.
‘She just came to collect something for Hazel.’ I picked up a wooden-framed photograph from the table and threw it against the wall. The frame broke in two and dropped to the ground. I half recognized an image of the two of us on a day out. There was a long pause. ‘Please don’t do that, my darling,’ he said. ‘You nearly hit me. We’ll get through this. I promise.’
I wanted desperately to believe him, but my mind was echoing with a thought that I knew was unfair but I couldn’t put away from me: If you had taken me home when I told you I was ill, I might not have lost the baby.
14
Southwark Library was only a fifteen-minute walk away, so Tibbot and I reached it by ten thirty. It stood at the end of what had once been a small parade of greengrocers and tobacconists and was now a large Closed Shop for Party members. The little windows were hung with curtains to prevent your seeing inside, but everyone knew that its shelves were always stocked. You could get bacon and legs of lamb all year round, and, in summer, strawberries. French wines for the price of beer. The stories got bigger all the time, so if you asked some people you would hear of whole pigs roasted on spits in the centre of the shop or whisky sold by the gallon. Others would tell you that their sisters’ friends worked there and they were allowed to take home a kilo of sausages each day. You never knew whom to believe.
A group of Teddy Boys were standing around outside, smoking. The Teddies had arrived about a year ago and seemed to be everywhere now, wearing their grandfathers’ Edwardian clothes, dressing like dandies in velvet frock coats and narrow-legged trousers, but in their pockets they carried flick-out knives and brass knuckles. They were harassed by the police, told to move on from their pavements and milk bars, and sometimes there would be a scrap between them but rarely anything serious. Secretly, many people admired them and their refusal to conform.
When we got to the library door, we were met with a sign saying that it was already closed, but Tibbot spotted movement inside and banged on the door. It was opened by a fidgety young man who, I noticed, was holding a collection of T. S. Eliot’s new work as National Poet – verses lauding our leaders that I couldn’t help but think were pretty thin.
‘Sorry, we’re closed,’ the young man said.
‘I know, I’m terribly sorry,’ I said, being as polite and friendly as I could. ‘We need to find a book. A particular book. Please. It will only take a second.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Please, it’s for my daughter’s homework. Just one second.’
‘I–’
‘She’s going to get in trouble if I don’t.’
He relented. ‘Oh, all right, come this way.’ He led us to his desk.
‘All we have is the long code,’ I said.
‘The decimal?’ he said, going to a thick hardback catalogue. ‘Well, unless it’s a common book, there’s no reason why we would have it ourselves. And, in that case, I won’t know which one it’s for.’ I felt deflated. ‘Now, let’s see.’ I handed him the note with the code. He tapped his finger on the first string in the column, DD2261033445298, and counted them with his finger. ‘Thirteen numbers. It can’t be the Dewey at all, then,’ he said. ‘On the Dewey system, three digits will tell you the subject quite precisely. This one, two-two-six, would place a book in’ – he checked down the list in his catalogue – ‘religion; then the Bible; then the Gospels. The following three digits would narrow it down further on the shelf if need be – if you have a lot of books about the Gospels, say – but the rest of the digits in this number wouldn’t mean anything. You can only have six in total. And these letters at the beginning, well… Sometimes you can put letters at the end of the sequence to denote the author’s surname, but not at the beginning.’
I was crushed, I had been sure we had made progress. ‘Are there other systems?’ I asked.
‘None that look like this, I think.’
‘Let’s put the code to one side for a minute,’ Tibbot said, back in our parlour. ‘Let’s say it’s nothing to do with her death. And let’s say that her death wasn’t an accident either. Who might have wanted to do her harm?’
‘I hardly knew her,’ I said. Did anyone really know her?
‘Most killings are just domestic,’ he mused. ‘Someone gets angry, drunk. It’s the boyfriend or husband.’
‘Nick’s not–’
‘I know. Did she have a boyfriend?’
‘I have no idea.’ I wanted to get back to what I was sure was the way in. ‘But this, this code. She was doing something secret, something NatSec wanted to know about. That has to be it, doesn’t it?’