‘When it gets too much, go into the bedroom.’ He stood rubbing his limbs. He hoisted Grest up and slapped his face a few times, until Grest started to whimper and turn away from the light blows. ‘I’m glad you’re awake,’ said Tibbot. ‘It makes it easier.’ He stabbed Grest hard in the ribs with his truncheon. The Sec cried out in pain and struggled. ‘Probably cracked one,’ Tibbot said. ‘I’ll do them all soon. You’ve seen it from the other side. You know what it looks like.’
‘I know who you are,’ Grest mumbled.
Tibbot shoved him back on to the bare floorboards, took his truncheon and placed it across Grest’s throat. He put his hands on each end and leaned on it, choking him. Grest tried to squirm away, but he was pinned too tightly and his eyelids fell. ‘You think that worries me?’ He lifted the truncheon. ‘What did you do to Lorelei Addington?’ Grest drew in air with a hollow, rattling sound. ‘What was it? Did you hold her under the water? Was that what you did?’
The Sec didn’t answer. The loathing that I felt for him – he seemed less than human to me now – worked against the aversion I felt for the violence.
Tibbot stood up. ‘All right. You know, I haven’t been trained in this, like you have. Me, I arrest people who steal from their neighbours, or sell a few black-market tins of peas from their cars. So I don’t really know what I’m doing with you.’ He took his truncheon and brought it down on Grest’s chest. ‘Your heart’s right where I hit you. Can that cause a heart seizure? I don’t know. But you’re young and fit, so you can probably take it.’ He rubbed his brow. Grest’s lips seemed to be searching for something to say. ‘There’s a science to it, isn’t there? Things that the Nazis developed and the Russians borrowed. And they passed it on to you. I don’t know about that. I’m as likely to kill you as get the truth out of you.’ I couldn’t tell if Tibbot’s words were empty threats or if I had never really known him and what he was capable of. I hated the man on the floor, but the prospect of being there when he was killed made me stop and take a step back.
‘Nothing to say? All right.’ Tibbot went to the top of the stairs and looked down. ‘We’ve got days. I could call in sick to work, spend a week here working on you. Leave you sitting in your piss all day, all night. You haven’t told anyone you’re here, we know that.’ He walked back and sat down with his back against the wall. For a while there was just the sound of Grest’s laboured breath. ‘My daughter died because she couldn’t breathe.’ He looked down at his hands and the truncheon he was holding.
The adrenalin subsiding, I turned to stare at the wall, but I couldn’t help glancing back to see Tibbot sit Grest up again so that the back of his head was against the bannister. He smacked Grest across the bridge of the nose with the butt of the truncheon – not a hard blow, but enough to make Grest’s eyes stream with water. Then he pulled back his arm, ready to strike him fully across the face.
I wanted it to stop then and there. I rushed over, pulled Tibbot’s hands away and dragged Grest’s head up. ‘Tell us!’ I cried.
Tibbot thrust me aside roughly and grabbed Grest. ‘I’m telling you now.’ Tibbot shook his head. ‘I’m telling you now that this time, when I start, I’m not going to stop. I’m too fucking tired of this.’ Grest twisted his face up. ‘So now, for the last time, I swear it’s for the last time, what did you do to Lorelei Addington?’
Grest held his gaze on Tibbot. His chest rose and fell with rasping air. His lower lip was split and a line of blood was running from it. ‘Held her under the water,’ he mumbled.
Tibbot wiped his face with his sleeve. He stood silent for a long time, collecting himself. ‘What did you want from her?’
Grest shut his eyes. ‘The medicines.’ He slowly licked his lips.
‘What medicines?’
‘Antibiotics. Other stuff.’
‘American medicines,’ I said. Tibbot stared at me. God, I had been a fool. I had sat there in a blank room with Grest, telling him things he already knew. It probably took all his effort not to laugh at me. What he had wanted all along was the book. And then I had blundered in and presented an easy way to find what he wanted. He had followed me right to where he thought I had it stowed. After that he could have done to me what he had done to her.
I told Tibbot everything. When I had finished, his head dropped and he sighed, as if knowing what lay behind it all made him weep. Somehow it seemed so tawdry. All this because they wouldn’t let us import the medicines we needed. I spoke to Grest. ‘Then you got what you came for. You took the drugs. The book was there too – if you wanted it, why did you leave it?’ He turned his head to one side and said nothing.
‘I swear to God…’ Tibbot began.
‘I couldn’t find it,’ the Sec muttered. A little blood seeped from his nose, over his top lip and into his mouth. He spat it out and glared at me. ‘You arrived and I stopped looking.’
So it had all turned on that. He had found the box of medicines but I had disturbed him before he got the book. If I had come just a few seconds later, things would have been so different. ‘It had all the buyers and their orders,’ I told Tibbot. ‘He would have needed it to take over.’
Tibbot walked away a couple of paces. ‘How did you get involved in all of this?’ he asked Grest.
‘I was a blue. Just like you.’
‘Not like me. What happened?’
He swallowed painfully. ‘Had a call a couple of years back, woman taken to hospital after a fight. Didn’t sound like much.’
But the woman was Rachel, admitted to hospital after her struggle with Lorelei; and Grest told her that she would escape prosecution if she told him everything. Instead of reporting it, however, he had shoved her into Richard Larren’s care, with her car as a down payment. He didn’t want to arrest them; he wanted a cut.
Tibbot wiped his hand over his head. ‘How much did you take to keep it quiet?’
‘Thirty per cent.’
‘Why did you kill Lorelei?’
And then Grest smiled, a horrible monkey grin. ‘I didn’t,’ he said.
‘What?’ I whispered.
The life had returned to him. ‘I didn’t. She was alive when I got here, and still alive when I left her.’ I didn’t understand what he was saying. ‘She told me where the stuff was, so I left her alone and went to the girl’s room to get it.’ He turned to look at me. ‘Then I heard you come in.’
‘Don’t lie to me,’ warned Tibbot.
‘What then?’ I demanded.
‘You went in there and she says something.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. “Who’s there? I can’t see.” Something like that. Then there’s all this splashing, like a fight.’
Sometimes we hear a phrase or name, and know for certain that we have heard it before. I was sure those had been her words. I heard them from her lips: Who’s there? I can’t see.
‘And?’ asked Tibbot. His voice was low and dangerous.
Grest spoke to me again. I could tell he was enjoying it now. My face must have betrayed my feelings, the sense of falling. ‘I left you to it.’ He laughed. ‘When I came out the girl’s room, you were bent over the bath with your back to me, so I just left.’ He turned to Tibbot. ‘Not what you thought, is it? Backed the wrong horse? You can smack me again and again, but you know it’s like I say it was.’ Tibbot threw him to the side and he crumpled to the floor. I placed my head in my hands.
‘Did anyone else come in?’ Tibbot demanded fiercely.
‘No, mate.’
‘He’s lying,’ said Tibbot.
But I saw the scene as he had described it. Who’s there? I can’t see. Lorelei was speaking those words, until they were drowned by surging water.
Grest shook with laughter. ‘So someone killed her, mate, but it wasn’t me.’ He looked in my direction. ‘They’ll get what’s coming to them, though.’
I ran to Lorelei’s room, collapsing into the seat at her dresser. My hands dropped on to the table and under my palm I felt something hard and polished: her hairbrush. It still had some of her hairs entwined in it.
‘Is he telling the truth?’ Tibbot said quietly. I hadn’t heard him come in.
‘I think so.’
But what he was implying – it just couldn’t be true. I wouldn’t have done that. We know ourselves and our own lives, don’t we? Or is that what happens when we begin to mirror the divided world around us? We become strangers to ourselves. No, it couldn’t be true.
‘We have to decide what to do,’ Tibbot said. His tone was different. He was trying to work things out too.
I gazed at her hairbrush. ‘Were you keeping a watch on me?’ I asked. ‘When I went to Great Queen Street?’
‘And when you left. I had a feeling you weren’t going to leave things alone. The thing about the Secs is that they just can’t imagine someone doing to them what they do to everyone else all the time.’ There was a pause. Tibbot looked around. ‘She travelled overseas, didn’t she? Met all those foreign actors and Presidents. I bet she brought stuff back with her. Perfect way of doing it. Besides, she’s on our posters: Victory 1945. Pin-up girl for the Party. No one’s going to stop her and go through her case. It would be like stopping Blunt.’
I hesitated. ‘What about Nick now? Will they release him?’
‘Yeah, I think Grest wanted your husband out of the way so he could get the contact information and take over – one hundred per cent is better than thirty. But Grest will be a good boy now. I’ve told him that if he doesn’t, I’ll have a word in a lot of ears. Spread it around.’ He went over to the poster for The Lucky Lady, with Lorelei in a red silk gown, her face set behind a carnival mask made of red lace, and a spinning roulette wheel. There was a smaller image of her singing – it was a musical, it seemed.
‘What will they do about her death? NatSec, I mean.’
He sighed. ‘Blame it on an intruder, I expect. Burglary that went wrong. Close the file.’
‘Are you certain they will close it?’
‘You can’t tell with these people. But I think so.’ He wiped sweat from his brow. ‘Jane?’
‘Yes?’
‘Will you do something for me?’
‘Of course, what?’
‘When your husband gets out, will you keep schtum about all this? Even from him. It’s just that the fewer people who know, the safer it is for me, you understand?’
‘Yes, of course.’ I owed him that a hundred times over.
I grabbed on to the thought of Nick returning home to us, and looked to the speckled light slipping through the window.