19

We followed the woman’s thin finger to a figure in the corner of the room with her hands clasped together and her back hunched over so we couldn’t see her face.

‘Rachel?’ I said.

She lifted her head and I caught sight of the features I had seen in the photograph from a few years earlier, but they were changed almost beyond recognition. Where the printed image had been of an attractive young woman, her dark hair tied back, here I saw her as if she had aged by a decade, her hair now matted and greying. And yet her eyes were keen as they locked on to mine.

‘Rachel Burton?’ I asked, as we edged towards her.

She made no reply but stared at the doorway. We spun around to find Larren looking furious. Another orderly appeared behind him.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ he demanded. ‘Get out!’

‘You said there was no Rachel Burton here,’ I replied. His jaw worked as if he were trying to speak, yet no words came from his mouth.

‘That car’s stolen,’ Tibbot added. ‘Should we take a look in your garage? Now, we need to talk to her.’

Larren wiped his brow on his sleeve. ‘Bring her to the visiting room,’ he muttered to the orderlies. ‘They’re police.’ I felt a thrum of nerves. So long as he kept thinking we were there on official business, we would be safe. But if he began to doubt us, there was no guessing what the outcome could be.

The two orderlies led Rachel along the corridor with Larren and me walking behind her. ‘Could she have got out of here a couple of days ago?’ I asked. ‘Got to London?’

‘Of course not,’ he replied angrily. I pondered how true that was. Certainly security was tight, but it wasn’t a prison. And people sometimes broke out of those too.

The visiting room was a plain, windowless hole with a single iron-caged electric light, a smell of carbolic soap, and a table and four chairs bolted to the floor. I pitied anyone forced to meet a loved one in such a place. As we entered, Tibbot told Larren to wait outside and we would speak to him later. We sat at the table as Rachel took the chair opposite, with her face down. Tibbot placed a notebook and pencil in front of himself. Habit, I suppose.

‘Hello, Rachel,’ I said. She made no reply. ‘How are you feeling?’

She looked up. ‘Who are you?’ her voice rasped, as if it hadn’t been used for a long time.

‘My name is Jane. Jane Cawson.’

‘Cawson!’ she spat, jumping up and clenching her hands into fists. ‘That bitch!’

‘She doesn’t mean you,’ Tibbot muttered to me, placing his hand on my arm to reassure me that we were safe. ‘She means Lorelei.’

‘Bitch.’ She unclenched her hands, but remained standing over us, bristling with an anger that was all the stronger for having been repressed for years.

‘Why do you say that?’ I asked her, trying to adopt a soothing tone.

‘Why?’

‘Yes.’

She glared at me and pulled back her hair to reveal pale skin, wrinkling and lifeless; and from her left eyebrow up to her hairline, where it disappeared, a thin line of white scar tissue. ‘This. I’ll serve her back.’

‘She’s dead,’ I said.

There was silence, then she sat back down. ‘Dead.’ She sighed heavily. ‘I’m glad.’

‘You’re happy about that?’

‘Yes.’

It was an ugly reaction, but I only needed her to tell me what had happened; her personal feelings weren’t important right then. I checked the door was shut and lowered my voice. ‘Rachel, I’m married to Nick Cawson.’ She narrowed her eyes – it obviously made me untrustworthy, like Lorelei before me. ‘We know you were involved in what she did. We have to know what it was.’ If they really had been involved with a dissident group and crimes of subversion, then he was never coming home; but if it was something else, we might find a way. Rachel just watched us, still wary. ‘We need to know.’

Tibbot spoke in a calm, relaxed voice. He must have been used to these situations. ‘Rachel? Do you understand?’ She nodded carefully. ‘You and Lorelei Addington. Who was directing you?’

‘Directing us.’

‘That’s right. Who did you deal with?’ She winced, as if the memories were painful; as if she hadn’t brought them to mind for a long time and now had to fight through a fog for them.

‘Did you know? Did Lorelei say?’

‘ “My uncle has been in touch.” ’

‘What?’ Tibbot replied.

‘She used to say it. “My uncle has been in touch.” ’

‘When did she say that?’

‘When the orders came.’

‘Where did they come from? What uncle?’

She sighed again. ‘Uncle Sam. Her joke.’

My breath caught in my throat. I had thought that Lorelei – possibly Nick – had been involved with some underground or dissident group, maybe one of the ones distantly encouraged by the Americans. But taking direct orders from them was so much more severe. We all knew that they recruited spies and saboteurs on our side, but I hadn’t imagined for a second that was her life, her level of life-endangering belief.

‘Rachel …’ Tibbot began.

But I interrupted him. The only chance now was that Nick had played no part in what she had been doing, or that Lorelei had been the driving force and he had just gone along with it. If so, the courts might possibly be lenient – years in a camp, rather than the rope. ‘Was Nick involved?’ I asked, trying to suppress the panic in my voice. ‘Was Nick …’ And then she was gone. Without warning, we were in pitch darkness. I heard a rushing sound and a brush of wind. ‘Rachel?’ I called out, my nerves like ice.

There was whispering in the dark. Words I couldn’t make out, followed by a thump on the table. I put my hands out, searching with them as if I could grasp the sounds.

‘She’s there!’ Tibbot said urgently.

The whispering became faster.

‘Rachel?’ I called out. ‘Rachel?’ I probed again with my fingers but found only empty air. Then something appeared: a spark in the black to my side. Another spark. A fire-glow piercing it to create a face that flickered in the light. Tibbot was holding a steel cigarette lighter that cast a pallid glow over Rachel, pressed against the wall with a terrified look on her face. She was repeating something to herself over and over, as if reciting a prayer. I eased myself from my bolted-down chair to approach her, but she flinched away. ‘It’s just a power cut,’ I said, with my hands open. ‘Just the electricity gone out, that’s all. Just the power for the lights.’ She seemed as though she were trying to crawl into the wall. I wondered what happened there in the dark to make her so afraid of it.

‘Just the lights gone off. That’s all,’ Tibbot reiterated, calmly. He stayed where he was, as she looked between us with her chest rising and falling. ‘Happens all the time, doesn’t it? Tomorrow the radio will say it was the Americans tampering with the lines or something.’ Her breathing slowly returned to normal, and she timidly pushed herself away from the wall. The lighter threw a strange, elongated silhouette of her on to the wall.

She edged back to the table, with tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘That’s right,’ I said. I took my handkerchief from my sleeve and handed it to her to wipe away the salt water. ‘That’s right. We’re fine now.’ I sat her down, and we all took our places again in the amber glow from the lighter. ‘Rachel.’ I put my hand on her wrist. ‘I have to know. Was Nick Cawson part of what you were doing?’

She rubbed the sides of her head, as if she were in pain. Under her fingers I saw little patches on each side of her skull that had recently been shaved and now had a thin coating of stubble. ‘Shocks,’ Tibbot said under his breath. I tried to say something but couldn’t find the words. It seemed barely human.

‘Rachel,’ I said again. ‘Can you remember if Nick Cawson was part of it?’ She looked down at herself with such sadness. ‘Rachel …’

Perhaps my frustration was coming through in my voice, because Tibbot told me quietly to leave her for a minute. His breath made the lighter flame flicker. ‘Who brought you here, Rachel?’ he asked.

‘A blue,’ she mumbled.

‘A policeman brought you here?’ The bulb above us came back on, making us all wince, and Tibbot snapped off his lighter. ‘Was he a local officer?’ She nodded. ‘How did he find out about you?’

‘The nurse told him. The nurse. Another hospital.’

‘Before this one?’

‘Yes. For this.’ The tip of her middle finger brushed along the line of pale dead flesh.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘We fought. I said it was too dangerous, the Soviets …’ She became confused again. ‘She pushed me and I fell.’

‘Did you fall against something?’

She nodded. ‘Then I was in the hospital.’

What had she been before the War? A shop owner? A soldier’s daughter? A theatre seamstress? I looked at her left hand, but could see no evidence of a ring. The only mark of a life before was the thin white one running through her skin. That was all that she had been allowed to keep.

‘Why did she do it?’ I asked more gently. ‘This … work. What was Lorelei doing it for?’

‘Money,’ she said quietly. ‘Excitement.’

They say that during the War half our agents in France were there for the thrill. Perhaps it wasn’t so strange that Lorelei would do the same.

Tibbot met my eye and I steeled myself, hoping it was time to return to the question that I most needed answered. ‘Rachel, was Nick involved in what you were doing?’

‘Nick,’ she whispered.

‘Yes.’ I spoke slowly, deliberately. I had to know. ‘Was Nick Cawson involved? Please tell me.’

‘Nick.’ She opened her eyes and looked sadly at me. ‘He ran it all.’

My heart fell to pieces. And for a second I wondered if I were really the one who was mad for refusing to acknowledge what should have been obvious from the beginning.

She was still speaking. ‘I told that policeman about them,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Taught the bitch a lesson.’

Coming to my senses, I began to argue with her, as if she would change her story. ‘But Nick’s not in government. What could he do for the Americans?’ I said.

‘He knows people, doesn’t he?’ Tibbot said quietly. ‘Doctor to people.’ And I realized something: that Tibbot had suspected this for a while, keeping it from me so that I would hold on to some hope.

Of course it was true. Nick had been angling to make contact with Ian Fellowman, Burgess’s Assistant Secretary at the Ministry of Information, with a view to becoming his doctor. If he had succeeded, how the CIA would have loved knowing those men’s state of health, what medication they were on, whether they were feeling stressed, whether they were going abroad the next month and where.

My fingers slowly scrabbled on the table surface. ‘Was anyone else involved with you?’ I asked.

Tibbot put a hand up to stop her answering. ‘We don’t want to know,’ he said. ‘Safer for them and us. It doesn’t matter now.’ And he was right: it didn’t matter now.

Then, without warning, Rachel’s hand flew across the table and snatched something. Before I knew it, she was leaping to the side, out of Tibbot’s reach as he grabbed for her and I saw what she had: his lighter and a page torn from his notebook screwed up. In a second the paper was alight and she was throwing it at the window in the door. As it left her fingers, Tibbot managed to grab her arm, but it flitted and flickered through the air. It meant nothing as a weapon, but as a little act of defiance it meant everything. The door flew open and Larren entered with three orderlies. One pushed Tibbot aside, while another rushed behind Rachel and dragged her arms back. She meekly let him. ‘I don’t care if you are the police,’ Larren barked. ‘She’s going back to the lock ward.’ Another orderly produced a gag, which he attempted to tie across Rachel’s mouth. ‘And if you want to speak to her again, you had better bring a warrant with you next time.’

Rachel suddenly wrenched the gag away and spat it to the floor. ‘She said there would be new orders!’ she cried. ‘Big orders.’

‘What orders?’ I shouted back, but Larren and the other orderly were forcing us out. ‘Rachel!’ I tried to get to her, but Tibbot stopped me, taking hold of my arm. ‘Let me go!’

‘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.