‘Leave her,’ he said in a quiet voice. ‘You can do nothing for her.’
‘Yes, listen to him,’ Larren said smugly.
One of the orderlies had her wrists, and another her ankles, as they wrenched her across the floor. She fought as well as she could, tearing one hand away to scratch at the burly man, drawing a line of red blood from his arm. He slapped her and she wailed into the gag. I tried again to reach her, but Tibbot put his body across mine. I knew what he was thinking – we were a hair’s breadth from being exposed. ‘Leave her alone!’ I shouted helplessly.
Larren snorted in derision. ‘Do what you have to do,’ he told the three men. They dragged her away, ignoring her cries as she twisted over and over, struggling like a beast in pain.
20
We found an empty carriage on the train back to London. You could tell by the leather seats that it had once been First Class, although those distinctions had been among the first casualties of the new order, and now we could all sit where we chose. Cheap and reliable transport for everyone was so important to the Soviets.
And yet the London transport system had proved more treacherous than they had expected. A few days after the first fence went up along what was to become the route of the Wall, hundreds of people sped beneath it from our side to the other in tiny, underground carriages. It wasn’t through the Tube – the Soviets had stopped those trains – but rather the little Post Office Railway, the network for delivering mail that the Reds knew nothing about until one of their friends in the Royal Mail ran to the Soviet HQ and told all. Their troops caught scores of people that day – men, women and children. They were lucky to get just a few weeks each in Brixton Prison – those who tried after, through the sewers or by climbing, usually got six months in solitary.
The Soviets learned from their mistake too. Instead of just closing the tunnels, they filled complete sections with rubble from the buildings that the Germans had destroyed during the relentless five-day bombardment that began their invasion. Most of those broken bricks had come from the East End – ‘a hotbed of Jews and Trades Unionists’, Mosley had informed the Nazi high command in advance. Well, those people had had their revenge in time, and Mosley’s body soon lay broken on the street, next to that of his vile wife.
Coming from Kent, I had never really known the devastation that London had suffered until one night when Nick and I had climbed up on to the roof of a theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, home to all the grandest playhouses. He had pressed a coin into the hand of an usherette during the interval of a musical, and she had surreptitiously pulled aside the chain that closed off the topmost flight of stairs.
‘You see how some of these theatres have the roof missing?’ Nick had asked me as the cool night air drifted about us.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘The Blitz?’
‘Not quite. This street’s where the Home Guard made their last stand against the Nazis.’ He shook his head. ‘Old men up here with rifles and paraffin bombs against Panzers. Well, until the Luftwaffe blasted it all to bits. Poor blokes.’ I tried to take it in, but it wasn’t so easy. The official line that we were fed by the new state was that Churchill, in an act of supreme cowardice, had immediately signed the order of capitulation and saved his own skin by running off to Northern Ireland with the Royal Family. Others argued – discreetly – that he had been right to leave because someone needed to be in charge to direct the resistance, which was true. Well, you took your pick of viewpoints.
A night fighter on patrol passed overhead. Nick went right to the edge and peered down. ‘Have you taken out life insurance?’ I asked casually.
‘Sorry, old girl, not a penny. So there’s really no point doing it.’
‘Pity.’
We looked to the other side of the Wall. Cars buzzed about with bright headlamps; there were omnibuses full of people; and bustling shops, despite the late hour. Sometimes, if you were close to the Wall and the wind was right, you could hear music coming over – that very fast, jumpy American jazz with guitars and singers that they played occasionally on Radio Free Europe. Young people – the Teddy Boys especially – would head to the basement milk bars of Soho to try to guess how the dances went, re-creating the steps while they drummed on the tables with cutlery and fists. I had pictured Nick and myself over there dancing to the hot tempo music before laughing out into the street as the sun came up.
The train wheels crunched over tracks as Tibbot and I trundled back to London now. I looked out the window at houses passing in the night.
‘He’s lost,’ Tibbot said. And he waited for it to sink in. ‘I’m sorry, really, but if you keep on, it will only bring this down on you too. If they thought you knew anything about it, you would already be in one of their cells.’ He was right. By delving into Nick’s secret, I had made myself a target. And I had made Tibbot one too.
It was all so hard to take in. I understood that the state had its enemies – it never tired of telling us that – but I just hadn’t seen Nick as one of them. I hadn’t known him.
Whatever he had been doing for the Americans, though, I guessed he had stopped by the time we married. But then Lorelei had died and her death had somehow brought her and Nick’s activities to NatSec’s attention. Whether her death was itself connected to their work, or was the product of something else entirely, didn’t really matter – NatSec had learned about them.
‘What do you think the “big orders” were?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Rachel said that’s what they had fought about. She and Lorelei.’ It was something so big they had come to blows. Yet, whatever it was, it didn’t appear to have happened yet.
‘I suppose it was all put on hold when she was taken in.’
‘I expect so.’ Perhaps that had been the final cause of Lorelei’s death: someone had wanted to stop the plan or to take it over… or anything, really. All those possibilities of which we had no idea.
We pulled into a station and waited. The lights flicked off and back on. A door slammed. From further down the corridor, we heard a man’s voice. ‘Your identity cards!’ It echoed through the train. Tibbot and I looked at each other, worried, and I pictured Larren on the telephone to whoever had transferred Rachel’s car to him in return for keeping her quiet in his asylum.
‘Two of them,’ Tibbot said, putting his head outside the compartment. ‘One’s on the platform.’
I knew that I should have stayed put and calmly handed over my card, crossed my fingers and bluffed it out. I knew that. But panic took hold of me.
I jumped up, slid back the door and bolted into the corridor, away from the voice. Tibbot ran after me and grabbed me by the arm just as I was about to enter the furthest compartment. ‘Calm down!’ he ordered me. ‘Breathe.’ He checked over his shoulder. Luckily the man on the platform had his back to us and the other wasn’t in sight.
‘Identity card,’ we heard again from one of the compartments.
‘I’m sorry, I have it here somewhere.’ It was a young man’s voice, a local accent.
‘What do we do if they recognize us?’ I asked furtively.
‘Come in and sit down.’ He pulled me into the next compartment. An old woman in a shawl was sitting alone. Trembling, she held her card out to us.
‘It’s all right, that’s not us,’ said Tibbot.
‘What do they want?’ she asked in a feeble voice.
‘Hard to say,’ Tibbot replied.
I shot him a glance. I wanted to tell the woman it was us they were coming for, that she was safe, even if we were not.