At first I presumed he was speaking to me. But the policeman replied, ‘Is that so?’ I could tell by his face that he was beaten, though, and I got the sense that there was something going on that I couldn’t see.
‘Thank you, Detective Sergeant. May I have your notes, please? They will go in our files.’ And that’s when I realized who he was. I had thought he must be a senior plain-clothes policeman, but I was wrong, of course.
The old police officer paused briefly to critically appraise him, but he didn’t challenge him before ripping the pages out of his notebook, handing them over and walking out.
The bald man spoke. ‘My name is Grest. I’m an officer of the National Security Police. Mrs Cawson, you’ll be free to go soon.’ I had never come face to face with a NatSec officer before. If I had started feeling less tense, less taut about where I was and what had happened, his presence reversed that.
‘I’ll go now,’ I said, feeling a seed of fear in my stomach.
‘No. Not yet, I’m afraid.’ His tone was smoother than the other officer’s, yet the message underneath it was far harsher and he made me nervous. I went for the door but he moved more quickly than I could and jammed his arm against it, stopping me in my tracks. There was something frighteningly mechanical and practised about the way he plucked me away and pushed me back into the centre of the room to sit on the bed. It made no sense because I had explained all I knew and I just wanted to leave with Nick.
‘Please let me go,’ I said.
‘Soon.’
I sank a little into the bed and stared around. Lorelei’s face gazed out from posters on every wall. The theatre bills were the more sedate, with just the name of the show, an inked image or two and the performance dates, but the garish film posters seemed crass, her presence in those films a mockery of a life that was now consigned to the past. The Whole Deal; A Month in the Country; Daisy Daisy; Victory 1945. Her image would still laugh and move and dance in them, but the human being was gone.
I stared blankly at Victory 1945. Lorelei’s finest hour. It was a film we had all seen many times, its poster dominated by the image of her character’s boyfriend wrestling a Gestapo officer to the ground. At the side she stood on a plinth, rousing the crowd to rise up against the Nazis and welcome our Red Army liberators arriving on the Archangel.
Below it, her cosmetics and hairbrush lay on the dresser still, objects as strangely lifeless now as her images on the posters. I touched the brush; it was made of fine bristles, with an ebony handle and silver detailing. A few of her hairs were entwined on it, long and shining. I put it to my own hair. Then in a moment I caught myself and dropped it, remembering where she was now.
After a few minutes, Grest checked what was happening outside. He seemed satisfied by what he saw and opened the door wide, indicating that I could leave. At that sign I felt an inexpressible surge of relief and hurried out to the top of the stairs, but, as my feet touched the top step, something pulled me up. The terrifying sight below was of Nick being pushed out the house by a heavyset man, his wrists in handcuffs. I couldn’t understand. He looked up at me. ‘It will be fine. I haven’t done anything,’ he called up. But his face betrayed the worry he clearly felt and I could only stare open-mouthed. ‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’ He was shoved out the door.
A second later my mind began to work again and I started to rush down, but the thin, white-haired policeman was at the bottom and he caught me before I could run outside. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Best not.’
‘Is he under arrest?’ I asked, frantic for someone to tell me what was going on.
It was Grest who spoke again. ‘It would be best if you go home, Mrs Cawson,’ he said from above us.
The suggestion seemed to me nothing but a joke at my expense. Amid all the madness and confusion, I had been clinging to Nick, and now all that was left was the chaos.
‘Is he under arrest?’ I pleaded.
‘Yes,’ replied the old policeman.
‘Why?’ I couldn’t think why they wanted him. It made no sense. He couldn’t have been involved in Lorelei’s death. He hadn’t been there. I wanted to shout it to them to make them understand. What were they not telling me?
The policeman just looked up at Grest. ‘Ask him.’
The Sec spoke: ‘We will speak to you again later, Mrs Cawson. But for now I can have a car take you home.’
I looked to the white-haired officer. He seemed to shake his head very subtly. With an effort, I quelled my nerves. Nick hadn’t done anything, I told myself, so he would be safe. ‘No, I can find my own way,’ I said, forcing the words out as if things were normal. ‘Thank you.’
‘Your choice,’ Grest replied.
‘When will my husband be back?’ I asked.
‘That depends on him.’
I wanted to scream out that we weren’t criminals. ‘Where are you taking him?’
I looked again to the policeman, and his uncomfortable silence gave me my only answer.
5
Our house was in a street of semi-detached properties built for the Edwardian middle classes, close to the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge. When I first saw it, I was taken by its simple, solid lines. It wasn’t grand but it had four bedrooms – twice as many as the little house where I had grown up – so it seemed huge to me. I wondered how Nick could afford such a place on a GP’s salary but his dark eyes had twinkled when I asked and he led me around the back to show why it was so cheap: the rear wall had been shorn away by a doodlebug in ’44, leaving a pile of rubble and a scar in the ground. A hastily erected wall in the middle of what had once been a rear parlour was the new back to the house, and a split in the bricks halfway up gave a pair of jackdaws access to the wall cavity, wherein they had built a nest.
If there hadn’t been a shortage of labour due to all the new flats being put up, Nick said, he could possibly have had the back of the house repaired properly, but as things stood we would just have to lump it. It didn’t seem such a hardship, in fact, I was excited about changes like the government’s push for housebuilding.
There were people who grumbled about the new way of things, but I couldn’t understand them, really – it would be wonderful, as far as I was concerned, to see an end to people living in slums and tenements. That would be the first great achievement of our new system and it did seem that the future could only be brighter. I had even been allowed to attend a couple of Party meetings in Herne Bay – although I had been quietly shown the door when I unwittingly broke the rules by mentioning the wrong thing.
Before the outbreak of the War, the Soviet Union had signed a peace agreement with Germany and had stuck to it, watching while the Nazi soldiers marched into Warsaw, Brussels, Paris and, finally, in 1944, London. That was when the Royal Family had fled to safety in Northern Ireland, then exile in Canada a month later, for it seemed all was lost. Six months after that the Red Army’s twelve million fresh troops had overrun the over-stretched German lines to claim all that territory for themselves; and the Soviets’ ensuing advance up through Britain had been halted only when the Americans had arrived in the North. The Royal Family had followed and taken up residence in Holyrood, their Edinburgh home. But, in the drizzle outside the Herne Bay Party meeting, it was explained to me that, while the glorious arrival of the Red Army was to be frequently celebrated, no reference was ever to be made to the Soviet Union’s prior agreement with the Nazis. It was no longer history. Well, I had my misgivings, but I tacitly agreed. After all, the past was less important than the future.