17
‘What number, please?’ she asked.
‘Exchange 213; number 4598.’
‘Please hold, caller.’ I waited. So much was riding on this. There was silence, a few clicks, and then the operator was back. ‘That number does not exist,’ she said. I thumped the side of the box in fury.
‘No line?’ Tibbot asked, disappointed.
I didn’t answer, as if acknowledging the failure would make it solid. I spoke again into the receiver. ‘Try exchange 812, number 9932.’
‘Please hold, caller.’ Again, I waited. Then the same deadpan voice. ‘That number does not exist.’ When the next number produced the same result, the operator’s tone changed. ‘Please stay on the line,’ she said. I heard muffled voices, as if she were speaking to someone behind her. Then she returned.
‘Caller, who are you trying to reach?’ There was something frightening about that question, as if it were something she had been instructed to ask me. I hung up immediately.
‘What’s wrong?’ Tibbot asked.
‘She was speaking to someone. About us.’
‘No, no, they get these calls all the time.’
‘She was!’
He huffed and blew out his cheeks, not wanting to argue more. ‘Maybe they aren’t telephone numbers after all,’ he said, changing the subject. It couldn’t be true – we had both been so certain. ‘Still, let’s try the rest.’ I must have looked worried. ‘It’s fine,’ he insisted.
I dialled 0 once more, hoping that it would be a different operator. It was, thank heaven – a warm Scottish accent asking me for my desired line. Still tense, I tried another number, hoping.
‘That number does not exist.’
At that, Tibbot gestured to me to hang up. ‘Hazel told you that the book has been up there since before her parents divorced, yes?’ he asked, when the receiver was down.
‘That’s right.’
‘So it’s at least a few years old. And the phone network was improved a couple of months back: all residential lines got new numbers, didn’t they? If these are phone numbers at all, it looks like they’re out of date. Maybe Lorelei stopped whatever she was doing; or there’s a newer list somewhere.’ I didn’t know what to say; it was crushing. ‘Look, keep trying, but let’s not get our hopes up.’ I nodded and tried again. But there was only the message ‘That number does not exist’ that told me the call would not be answered. Then it was the sixth of seven entries. I read out the number without much hope and heard the familiar silence. Then a clicking. Then the operator’s voice.
‘Connecting you now.’
And then – incredibly – a distant ringing that said we had made a connection. Tibbot punched the air before pressing his ear next to mine so he could hear. We were on tenterhooks, barely daring to breathe in case it somehow caused the line to cut out. It rang and rang.
‘Are they there?’ Tibbot asked, frustrated. ‘Answer the bloody thing.’
After a full minute without an answer, I gently placed the handset back in the cradle and pressed the button to return my money.
‘But it’s better than nothing. I suppose they haven’t had their number changed,’ I said, doing my best to remain positive. I pondered for a second. ‘Is it just residential numbers that changed?’
‘Yes.’
‘So this one might be a business or government number?’
‘Yes,’ he said, nodding. ‘Yes, you might be right. Try it again.’ I hardly needed to be told. Once again, there was silence, clicking and the faint ringing, as if the other telephone were a few metres along the street and we could just reach out and touch whoever was standing beside it. But it rang and rang without a voice coming on. I hung up for the second time. Still excited, I tried the final number, but the result was back to ‘That number does not exist’.
‘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?’
The woman’s lips twitched as she said the name to herself. ‘Rachel. Yes. Yes.’ I shot a look at Tibbot, keeping my excitement under control. ‘Would you like to come in?’
‘Yes, we would. Thank you very much.’ She shuffled to a draughty front parlour and asked us to sit on a pair of upright wooden chairs that barely took our weight. ‘How did you know her?’ Tibbot asked.
‘Oh. Oh, yes,’ she said, staring at us, before going slowly to the kitchen. ‘I would like some tea,’ she mumbled.
‘How did you meet her?’ Tibbot called through the open doorway, gently pressing her. We waited, listening to the kettle whistle. She didn’t reply until she returned with three cups of weak tea. ‘How did you know Rachel?’
‘This is my husband.’ She touched a framed fading photograph of a man in clothes from the beginning of the century, on the crumb-laden table beside her.
‘Your husband?’
She lifted his photograph. ‘This is him. Lionel.’ Her mouth quivered. ‘The War, you see.’ She meant the first War, the Great War. The carousel of battles had just kept spinning.
‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ Tibbot waited until she replaced the photograph. ‘And he introduced you to Rachel?’ She looked away and dabbed the corner of her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Was it him who introduced you to Rachel?’
‘Rachel?’
‘Yes.’
She looked at me and squinted. ‘Are you Rachel?’
‘No,’ I said.
She waited for us to say something more. ‘Do you remember Rachel? Rachel Burton?’ Tibbot asked again.
‘Who?’
‘Rachel Burton?’
She stared blankly at us. Tibbot smiled at her and we stood up. ‘Well, thank you for your time,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ I repeated unhappily.
‘Are you going?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid we have to go now.’
‘Oh. Well, please come again.’
‘We’ll be sure to,’ I replied.
On our way out, Tibbot slipped a pound note under the cushion on the chair. She would find it later. ‘She shouldn’t live like this,’ he said, as we felt the cold air outside.
He rubbed his hands together against the cold. ‘Streets like this, they used to leave their doors open. Everyone’s gran.’
‘I grew up on a street like this.’
We picked our way over rubble. ‘I had a case last month,’ he said. ‘Postman found an old boy locked in a flat. The poor bloke was shivering – no heat in the place, hardly any clothes, covered in bruises. He wouldn’t say a word, but it turned out it was his daughters knocking him about. Never let him out. Kept him for his war pension. Extra few quid. Never used to be like that. Never.’
I looked back at the woman’s battered door. Age was something we couldn’t help, but our families – they were supposed to stay with us. It was so unnatural to be cut off.
We tried more doors, but people had moved around so much – first when the Germans landed at Portsmouth after D-Day, and later when the Soviets had followed and started reassigning homes. Those old communities where people knew everyone in their street had been splintered and no one could help us. ‘Well, that puts the kibosh on that,’ Tibbot sighed.
‘What about the doctor who was given Rachel’s car?’
‘Richard Larren. No address for him, and Kenneth couldn’t find any more details in the records – he even tried the Medical Board, but they’re closed today. I can call them tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow could be too late.’
‘I know, but I can’t see how else to go about it.’
‘Perhaps Nick knew him,’ I said, grasping at straws. ‘Let’s find out.’
At the end of the road there was a pub. It had a wooden telephone booth covered with messages scratched in ink – swear words, names and dates, a childish joke. I called a familiar number and the line was answered immediately.
‘The consulting rooms of Nicholas Cawson. Charles O’Shea speaking.’
‘Charles, it’s Jane Cawson. I have a question. Does my husband ever have any dealings with a Dr Richard Larren?’
‘Richard Larren? Not that I know of.’
‘Can you check?’
‘I’m looking through the addresses file now. There is no Richard Larren listed.’
‘Oh.’ I was disappointed.
‘Who is he?’
I kept it vague so as not to arouse any curiosity. ‘I thought he might be someone who could help get Nick released.’
‘How?’
The truth was that I didn’t even know the answer myself. But if I said nothing, it would only make him more suspicious. ‘I think he can say that Lorelei’s death was an accident.’
Charles paused. ‘He will be in the medical certification directory.’
‘What?’
‘It’s an annual requirement.’
I dared to see a glimmer of hope. ‘Do you have it?’ There was another pause, and I wondered if he was having second thoughts about becoming involved – with his family’s history of supporting the Royal Family, he could easily end up without a job or home if he made it into NatSec’s files. ‘Oh, Charles, I promise you I’ll make sure that nothing bad will come of it. In fact, if Nick gets out and the case is closed, it really makes us all safer. They won’t be breathing down our necks.’ There was a hiss on the line.
‘Wait.’ It went quiet for a minute, broken by the sound of movement in the background, as if things were being shifted around. Time ticked away. And finally there was a clunking sound as he lifted the receiver from his desk. ‘Richard Larren’s address is Willoughby Hospital, Willoughby, Kent. There are no more details.’
‘Oh, thank you, Charles, that’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘Thank you. I have to go now, but I’ll see you soon.’
‘Goodbye.’
I hung up. ‘Shall we call him?’ I asked Tibbot.
‘Better to turn up in person. If he knows something, he’s more likely to tell us face to face. Otherwise, he can just put the phone down.’
‘Yes, you’re right.’ I was lucky he was there, or I would have blundered my way into dead ends.
‘Let’s try that other number, though.’ We tried the number from the book again, but it wasn’t answered. Still, Richard Larren’s address held out a prospect of success. Tibbot checked a train timetable he had picked up when we arrived. ‘Willoughby’s just two stops back up towards London,’ he said. ‘We’ve got twenty minutes before the next one. Willoughby Hospital. Wonder what exactly he does there.’
We set off along the road, which had become gloomy in the twilight. As we walked, I pondered what we would find – something that exonerated Nick? Or something that proved him guilty of a plan I didn’t yet understand?
I was distracted from those thoughts, however, by a commotion – children running, adults hurrying, all in the same direction. I looked to Tibbot. ‘Nothing to do with us,’ he said.
‘But what if it is?’ There was such urgency that I thought somehow it might be connected to our search for Rachel. ‘It’s possible. We should see.’
He glanced in the direction of the station, then back at the clutch of running people. ‘All right,’ he relented.
We followed them to the fence along the waterfront, to find all eyes fixed on a small launch, barely bigger than a rowing boat, battering at speed through the waves. Steered by a young man, it shot eastwards towards the open sea. These attempts never happened in London because the Thames was too well defended there, but outside the capital people tried from time to time to escape by water. I had heard of night-time bids to slip from Herne Bay around the coast, although I had no idea if they were ever successful.
Everyone was watching the boat, willing it on. Above us, harsh searchlights picked out the launch, making the waves glitter. Then three cracks split the air and I looked up to see a guard in the watch tower lower his rifle.
I stared out to see if the young man had been hit. We all did. But the boat was still moving – the guard had missed. I felt my heart lift as if I were in the little vessel with that young man putting his life at risk to get to a northern shore. From the west, one of our patrol boats appeared, racing in his wake, hugging the shoreline.
‘Will he make it?’ I asked Tibbot, putting aside, for a moment, our own purpose that afternoon. But it struck me that our task wasn’t unconnected to this sight. Whatever had, ultimately, pushed this young man to speed between air-cutting bullets in the Thames Estuary was surely the same cause that had left Lorelei shimmering under cold, drifting water in London. ‘If he can get to the middle, he might. That’s where the mines are – our boat won’t follow.’
He was only a few hundred metres from the centre line. It couldn’t take him long.
‘Won’t he set off the mines himself?’
‘Maybe little boats don’t set them off. I don’t know.’
The people around us were egging the pilot on. The men in particular were shaking the wire fence. The children kept trying to climb the links but were dragged down and slapped by their parents, who pointed to the watch towers that were spitting more and more bullets.
‘Will he get through?’ I asked aloud.
‘Yes!’ a young man shouted back, abandoning discretion. Another patrol boat roared in from the east, but they were both holding back.
‘What are they doing?’ I said.
Tibbot jerked his thumb to the towers. ‘Too many rounds. They don’t want to get hit themselves.’ The young man kept changing his course, apparently trying to make it harder for the soldiers to aim.
‘He’s going to do it!’ shouted one of the men. But, just as he did so, there was another volley of gunfire and the pilot disappeared from view.
‘Did he fall in?’ cried one of the women.
‘No,’ Tibbot said quietly. ‘He’s in the boat.’ The little craft began to steer a wild course, wheeling in a circle, before the engine cut out. It bobbed gently in the water, drifting along with the tide. There was silence now from the people watching. ‘Let’s go,’ Tibbot said.