‘A friend of mine,’ I said.
‘A friend? Just waiting up here?’ His tone wasn’t pleasant.
‘It’s none of your concern.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘No,’ Tibbot replied.
‘Well, I’m going to ask you again.’ He stabbed his finger at Tibbot. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Look, mate, do you really fancy your luck?’ the old policeman replied. ‘Only that pricey bit of schmutter you’re wearing won’t look very nice ripped apart.’
Charles twisted around to look down at me. ‘I don’t know what this is about, but you had better stop it.’ Realizing that he would get nowhere, he looked icily at Tibbot once more and stomped out to the street.
‘He’s not very happy, but that doesn’t matter,’ Tibbot said as he descended the stairs. ‘It’s a bigger problem that either he doesn’t know who this woman is or won’t tell us.’
‘So what do we do?’ I replied, annoyed not by Charles’s attitude – I couldn’t have cared less about what he thought of me at that moment – but by the fact that it had been a waste of precious time.
He rubbed his jaw. ‘I can try a friend in the Transport Division. It might be Liberation Day, but if I know Kenneth he’ll be in the office enjoying the peace and quiet while everyone else is out jumping up and down for Comrade Blunt. He never really goes in for Liberation Day, if you know what I mean. Always prefers to be the one minding the shop.’
‘Will he help us?’
‘I think he’ll try. That might not be enough, though. A lot of the records went up in smoke thanks to the Luftwaffe. Of course the Party has more than made up for it with those new files in Somerset House.’ It was strange to hear a policeman talk that way. The scepticism was almost dissident. I knew what sort of files he was talking about. ‘But we might have a record of the registration plate.’
‘The telephone is in the hall,’ I said.
‘Better from somewhere else.’
A vagrant sat sleeping inside the call box across the road from our house, slumped against the glass walls. His legs, which were bare below the knee, were covered in a damp film of soot, and he had strange bumps under the skin on his nose and cheeks. ‘Wake up, mate,’ Tibbot said. The man stirred and, without a word, hauled himself up and staggered away.
‘What was wrong with his skin?’ I asked.
‘See it quite a lot with the vagrants. Caused by a social disease they have. One of the ones that doesn’t exist.’
He reached into his pocket and drew out a little leather-bound notebook. Inside, in tiny slanted handwriting, there were lists of telephone numbers and he ran a stubby finger down one page, then the next, until he found what he was looking for. He picked up the receiver and gave the operator the number.
‘Hello, Kenneth?’ he said, once connected. ‘It’s Frank Tibbot. Oh, not so bad. Not so bad. Getting old and doddery. Yeah. And tell me, what was your lot up to on Saturday? Two against Portsmouth? I could beat Portsmouth meself. Yeah, you can try. That’s right. Anyway, work call. I’ve got an old reg for you. Can you check it? Well, just do your best. Ta. It’s YXA 998. Old Sunbeam. Got that? Good. How long, do you think? And Ken, do you want to meet for a drink – you can give it to me then? You got it in one. All right. No, you’re right. Yes. Cheerio.’ He hung up. ‘He has to get the files from storage – if they still exist.’
‘You’re meeting for a drink?’ I said, amazed. ‘It’s urgent.’
‘You never know who’s listening, even to police lines,’ he explained calmly. ‘Especially to police lines. You don’t want to raise any suspicion, so you keep things social.’ I regretted my naivety. ‘He’s in Somerset House. I’m meeting him at two, at a pub round the corner from there.’
‘Are you sure it’s safe to go anywhere near the Strand?’ I asked. ‘Today of all days.’
He shrugged. ‘No worse than anywhere else today.’
15
The First Secretary is now making his way to Highgate Cemetery to visit the tomb of Karl Marx. It was Comrade Blunt’s leadership of the Communist Party of the Republic of Great Britain that resulted in the fulfilment of the promise that Marx and Engels made: that Communism would flourish in the land of Britain.
The stream of tanks and armoured cars, ranks of men with Kalashnikovs, girls with shining pistols and fresh-faced Pioneers holding up photographs of Comrade Blunt stretched for three kilometres along the swept-and-washed Strand, up Fleet Street, where the crowds were held behind steel barriers, and around the People’s Hall of Solidarity like a noose. Tibbot was meeting Kenneth alone in a pub around the corner, because it could have made Kenneth nervous if I had turned up too; and watching the parade was the best way for me to avoid attention while I waited nearby.
A squadron of Air Pioneers marched past with little wings stitched to the lapels of their uniform. They were the boys who had shown the most aptitude in their dexterity tests and now dreamed of piloting Soviet-made Yaks in dogfights with the Americans above London. They wore proud expressions as they passed their yelling parents and jealous schoolfriends. After the boys came the older girls in the boiler suits of engineers, followed by honoured assembly-line workers. And then a crowd-pleasing moment as a cavalry regiment trotted through, the kids behind the barriers scrambling forward to get a closer look at the stamping horses.
Liberation Square was unnaturally warm and humid due to the surrounding jets of paraffin flame that constituted the Smog Dispersal System: the intense heat from the circle of bright fires evaporated the suspended droplets of water in the smog, thinning it until there was just a light smoky mist. It had saved the lives of countless air crews during the War who would otherwise have been unable to find the landing strips, and now it enabled us to see our leaders in all their glory. Along with boiling the air, its light threw a strange dark glow on us, accentuating the lines and shadows in everyone’s flesh.
And, finally, there he was: borne on a wave of cheers, Anthony Blunt, standing upright in a huge, open-topped car sweeping along the road. Officially, Blunt’s role in the day’s ceremonies was to pay respect to his forebears, not to receive it for himself. So he had first visited the desk in the National Museum Reading Room at which Marx had sat while he composed Das Kapital, and then the great man’s grand mausoleum at Highgate Cemetery. Now Blunt was serenely climbing to the platform as the crowd shouted his name. At precisely one thirteen, the time that the Archangel’s guns had fired for the first time on a German cruiser, a squadron of Red Guards shot three times into the air, and Comrade Anthony Blunt stepped to the microphone.
He stood for a moment surveying the crowd as we waited upon his words. A breeze slipped among us. Then he leaned in and spoke, his aristocratic voice dripping with confidence. ‘The destiny of man is a river. It has shallows and rapids. Eddies and calms. There are times when it is so dark that it cannot be made out, and others when it is so bright that a child knows where it is heading. We know where we are heading.’ He waited as people whispered to their neighbours. His address was different from those he broadcast on the radio: there was less delicacy and nuance; these were words for a huge audience. ‘We know because for the first time in the tide of human life, we, the people, can steer our course.’ More whispering, excitement. The wind blew the heat from the paraffin jets over us.
He grew more forceful. ‘For the first time in history, no one who falls sick will die from want of care; no one will sit idle for want of work; no one will lie hungry for want of bread. For the first time in history, all men and all women can choose their rulers; can walk where they want, can say what they believe.’ I couldn’t help but wish that were true, and somehow, as he said it with confidence and commitment, I almost believed that it were. Atmosphere can do so much to what you feel and think. ‘We know what we believe.’