‘We’ll get there,’ Tibbot said. ‘We’ve got one that works. But let’s go and find this Rachel Burton. She’s tied up in this.’
I looked at my watch as we walked quickly towards Blackfriars Station. It was half past three. ‘Where do your colleagues think you are?’ I asked.
‘Looking into some phantom theft of a box of coats from a shop.’
‘Too dull for them to ask you about it?’
‘That’s about right. I’m old and decrepit, you see.’ His slight smile faded back to his normal grimmer expression. ‘But you know I still have to be a bit snide about it. Especially now – they’re talking of putting a political officer in every station so we’re a bit on edge. Anyway, there’s a chance we’ll get stopped somewhere along the line – coppers or the Secs. If it happens, just let me do the talking. I’ll say you’re a friend and we’re looking for a relative of mine who I lost track of during the War. Keep it vague.’
‘What if they don’t believe us? If they check up on it.’
‘Well, if it gets serious, I can throw myself on the mercy of my inspector, say it’s a personal thing I want to keep to meself. We go back, me and Jim. And I know a thing or two about him too.’
‘Will that really work?’
‘To tell the truth, I don’t know.’
‘All right.’ I was more than happy for him to do the talking. If I had had to come up with some excuse for our enquiries on the spot, I would probably have gone to pieces anyway.
‘So Miss Burton lives in King Henry Road,’ he mused. ‘Won’t be that for very long.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘A bit too Royalist, isn’t it? They’re renaming all the relic streets.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said, looking around me as if I could see the changing names. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
It seemed strange to be getting to know each other on a personal level now, after we had been through so much together already. ‘Herne Bay.’
‘Nice. I used to go there with Elsa and Julie. Did you ever come up to the smoke when you were young?’
I told him how my parents brought me up for a day when I was ten or twelve. We had walked through Mayfair, what my dad had said was the poshest of London’s neighbourhoods. ‘I thought the big houses looked like palaces from a fairy tale.’
‘The Jerries did for a lot of them. Real pity.’
‘Oh.’
I wondered what it looked like now. The DUK might have rebuilt them – not, I hoped, as concrete blocks, like on our side. And it was strange to think that, as I had walked up the eastern pavement of Regent Street just the previous day, past the empty windows of the big old stores, the buildings on the other side of the Wall had once looked out on to the same road, with gleaming displays of plush furniture, jackets and boots, cots. Those frontages had since been sealed in by the concrete border that had been built right up against them, and the buildings had been turned around to face the other way as if the division between us was just too grotesque to look at.
‘All this change,’ Tibbot said. ‘Do you even remember when the money had the King on it?’ Until he brought it up, I actually had forgotten that there had been a time when Marx and Engels had been absent from those little tokens. ‘Or all the other newspapers we had. Sunday Pictorial. The Times. Yeah, I bet you don’t even know how much you’ve forgotten.’
It was only a few minutes’ walk to Blackfriars, where we caught a fast train to Gravesend. Within an hour we stood in front of 2 King Henry Road – or what was left of it. Most of the street, it turned out, had been demolished to make way for a new block of flats. There were cranes lifting big concrete slabs into place, guided by men in helmets.
‘Lots of air raids around here just before D-Day,’ Tibbot said, looking at the rubble. ‘Going for the docks; and RAF Gravesend was a fighter airfield, part of Biggin Hill. These houses would’ve been hit a few times.’ On the train down, we had seen Yak fighters taking off on routine patrol – a strange twist of history, really.
‘You weren’t in the War, though, were you?’
‘Me? No, not this one. Far too old.’ The first War, I guessed. A pals’ battalion. Wipers or Gallipoli. Young men happily tramping off to what they had thought would be an adventure but finding only mud and drowning trenches. ‘Mate of mine at the station was RAF down here, though. He says it was chaos – the Stukas spent months busting up all our fighters on the ground. That’s why there was no air support on D-Day and the Luftwaffe had a free hand to bomb our boys on the way over. I’m glad I didn’t have a son.’
The road faced on to the Thames Estuary but was cut off from the water by the familiar steel fence and watch towers.
A group of children, aged between six and nine, were playing in the rubble. They wore threadbare clothes, and their looks, as we approached, ranged from fear in the younger ones to defiance from the older, as if we had come to throw them off the only playground they knew.
Tibbot had a quick glance around to make sure there were no police nearby before addressing the boy who seemed to be the eldest. ‘You look like a sharp gang,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to find a friend of mine called Rachel Burton. Do you know her?’ They shook their heads, glaring at us. ‘There’s a few bob in it if you do.’ By some unseen signal, they turned around and marched away in single file. Tibbot called after them but they just ran. He shrugged his shoulders and pointed to a call box. ‘Let’s give it another go.’ I nodded in agreement. We had tried the number twice more on the way without luck but weren’t about to give up. We had to get lucky sometime.
I pulled out the numbers that we had taken from Lorelei’s list and tried the sixth one. There was the usual rattling, then the long ringing. Just as before, it rang and rang without answer. I began to place the receiver back on its hook.
‘Hello?’ a tinny voice said through the line.
I jumped, pressed the button to talk and held the receiver so hard to my ear that it hurt. I had prepared something to say but it had spilled from my mind. Tibbot gestured to me to calm down, and I did my best to bring my speech under control. ‘Hello. I… I’m sorry to disturb you,’ I stammered. ‘But may I ask who you are?’
There was a pause. ‘You called here.’ It was a woman’s voice, suspicious and careful. I moved the earpiece so that Tibbot could hear too.
‘Yes, I know.’ I searched around for a reason to call. My mind was blank. ‘Please, I have to know who you are.’
‘I’m not really supposed to be answering this line at all. I’m just standing in,’ she said.
‘Just–’
‘I can’t.’
‘Please!’ I said, letting the emotion out.
I heard her breathing. Then a click and a mechanical hum to say she had hung up. I gasped and tried to call again. The number connected and rang until it cut out. I tried again. No answer.
‘I can try to find out where that line goes, but I’ll do it on the quiet when I’m back at the station,’ Tibbot said. ‘Better to keep things quiet.’
‘All right.’
‘We’ll get there, honest. But for now, we’ll try the neighbours about Rachel.’
We knocked on doors and stopped people in the street. After a while we tried a door in desperate need of patching up and painting – a lower corner seemed to have been kicked away. It was opened by a woman shrunken by age. ‘Good morning, madam,’ said Tibbot. ‘We’re from the council.’ He didn’t want any repercussions from these enquiries. ‘We’re asking about a woman named Rachel Burton. She used to live around here. Did you ever know her?’