‘All right.’ Things were looking up.
‘What was it that you found? The key.’
‘I don’t know for sure if it’s right, but it could be. It’s to do with the names and the dates on her posters. Think about Victory Nineteen Forty-Five. VN came up twice, remember? We need to go back to her house to check the other posters – they’re in the bedroom, I’ll show you.’
He mulled it over and sounded cautiously positive. ‘All right.’
We turned on to the main road. A big car with darkened glass in the windows slowed beside us and I tensed. It had the hammer and compass in the centre of the registration plate and was immediately followed by another car, this one with the Soviet flag – their sickle in the place of our compass – indicating that it contained some of the Soviet officers who were here with their troops at the long-standing invitation of our government. A policeman waiting in front of a pair of solid gates stopped the traffic to let the two dark cars turn right across the road and in through the gates. Before they closed, I caught sight of a large, old house set back from the road.
‘What is that place?’ I asked.
Tibbot cleared his throat. ‘I’ve only seen two types of people enter those gates,’ he said. ‘Party officials and young women. And I don’t think it’s a secretarial college. I suppose that’s them celebrating Liberation Day.’
God knows my own background wasn’t privileged, but I had never had to consider some of the ways people survived now. I wondered more about those girls than about the men – their backgrounds, their families, the homes they had left or never had. And I remembered that, while Tibbot was helping me save my family, he too had had one once. I had been fearful at the thought of a life alone, but he was already living it.
I placed my hand on his arm. ‘What happened to your daughter?’ I asked.
He took off his square glasses to clean them with a handkerchief from his pocket, and I saw his eyes properly for the first time, the wrinkled bags under them hanging from age and drink. He was struggling with the memory and I wanted to console him, but I could sense an old-fashioned pride in him that wouldn’t have it.
‘Wasn’t far from here, actually,’ he said eventually, still looking at the spectacles in his hand. ‘No, not far. There were rumours that NatSec wanted wider powers of arrest, but the police persuaded Blunt to refuse because we didn’t want the Secs stepping on our toes. Julie was on her way to work in her pub and got caught up in a demonstration against the government. Students. About the elections and the Party winning like they did. No better than the Nazis, they were saying. They didn’t know better back then.’ We knew better now. He slipped the glasses back on and his eyes became bigger and less distinct for me.
‘What then?’ I gently prompted him.
‘Some NatSec stooges, agents provocateurs, went into the crowd and started throwing stones at the police so the police charged at them. They knocked a few of the students about – not too badly, but enough to make the others start running, and Julie fell over.’ His voice was a whisper for the final words. ‘She’d had asthma since she was a kid.’
‘She had an attack?’ He nodded. I felt a deep mix of sorrow for him and outrage for all of us. ‘You’re sure they were NatSec people who started the trouble?’
‘Yeah. I did some asking around after, had a few words with some of the coppers who were there. The ones who started it were older than the students, dressed differently. All men. No girls. It was called a riot on the news and the Secs got their way because they convinced Blunt that these students were going to bring down the new state and the police were thugs. We knew what really happened, but we couldn’t say nothing. Just had to cut our losses.’
I didn’t know how to ask. ‘Were you there too?’
‘No,’ he sighed. ‘No, if I had been, I might have been able to do something.’
I gazed along the road. ‘Do you have other children?’
‘Just Julie. When I got a bit down with the job, I would think about her growing up.’
‘Your wife?’
‘Oh, Elsa’s gone too now. So the answer to your question,’ he said, ‘the one you haven’t asked me, is that I’m doing this because I’ll be put out to pasture soon and this is all I can do against them. Not much. But it’s something, isn’t it?’
A strike back against the people who had taken his daughter from him. Yes, it wasn’t much but it was something. What he wasn’t speaking of, but I could sense, was the guilt he felt over his daughter’s death, the guilt that he hadn’t been there to protect her.
And that meant that I was taking advantage of a decent man’s burden. Like everyone else, I suppose, I thought of myself as a good person but the new era had brought about changes. ‘You’re not frightened of them?’ I asked.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘Oh, what can they do to an old man like me?’
I thought for a second. There was the ageing man I had seen holding up a banner in Liberation Square, thrown into the back of an army truck.
The truth, really, was that they could do a lot.
It felt different being in Lorelei’s house with someone else – this time the weeds outside were just weeds, rather than creatures to grab hold of me; the seeping smog was just the weather and not some smothering blanket. ‘Nice place,’ Tibbot said under his breath as we moved through. ‘Hardly noticed it yesterday.’
‘Nick lived here, with her,’ I said.
‘Very nice.’
As I passed the bathroom door, I couldn’t help but look in. A thin shard of smoky light was slipping through the gap between the curtains and glittering in the long gilt mirror. Dust seemed to swim hypnotically in it, and, as I stared at the dark glass, straining to make myself out, pressure built in my head. And then, without warning, another figure slipped in from the edge of the glass, just as it had the first time I had seen it, when the room had been hot and damp and Lorelei’s eyes shone under the water. I yelled and spun around straight into his outstretched hands.
‘What’s wrong?’ Tibbot said urgently, searching my face for the cause of my fear.
I pushed away from him. ‘Nothing,’ I said, shaking my head, annoyed at myself. ‘Nothing. Let’s just get on with this.’ He stood back and watched as I hurried to Lorelei’s bedroom. ‘There,’ I said, as he entered the room, doing my best to sound grounded. I pointed to the posters on the wall. ‘That’s where the key comes from.’ I showed him the list of codes I had copied from the book.
DD2261033445298 wfn
VN1081209994632 str cor
TW3284408109028 pro wfn
AM7126026369346 cor
VN4653310089328 cor str
DO5574301038201 wfn pro
TL2159414038033 nor
‘Look at the first letters: DD; VN twice; TW; AM; DO; TL.’ For each one, I indicated the corresponding poster on the walclass="underline" ‘Daisy, Daisy; Victory 1945; The Whole Deal; A Month in the Country; Double or Quits; The Lucky Lady.’
‘Yes, I see,’ he said. ‘But what’s the actual key? We have some posters and a string of numbers. How do the numbers relate to them?’