22

Rachel’s words made sense when I thought of what I had found in Lorelei’s house. I lifted my head and spoke to Hazel. ‘Can you go to your room for a bit? I’ll come up and speak to you soon.’ She reluctantly agreed, and as she returned to her bedroom I went into the back garden.

An aeroplane – civilian – rushed overhead in the direction of the coast. Flying in the other direction, a grey-and-black jackdaw soared and dipped, then came to a sudden swooping stop on one of the broken timbers that poked from the house’s upper storey into the void a few metres above the ground – the remnants of what had been knocked down by a doodlebug in ’44.

Above those exposed bones of the house was the uneven and ugly replacement back wall, thrown together in the months that had followed the peace. The lines of the bricks weren’t straight, and the weather or subsidence had combined with the poor workmanship to prise apart two jagged expanses of them at the rear of Nick’s study. He once told me that the gap led to the wall cavity, where the birds roosted at night.

The bird I was watching hopped along the projecting timber to the wall, sat for a while without moving, as if waiting for something to happen, then fluttered through the breach. I stared up at the brickwork, wondering. In the corner of the garden there was an old Anderson shelter that served to store some of Nick’s larger junk, and inside I found a rickety and paint-splattered folding ladder. As I propped it up against the wall, the jackdaw emerged, looked down at me as if I had disturbed it and flew away.

The ladder shifted a bit as I climbed, but I kept on up until my face was level with the broken floorboards jutting out. The wood, I saw, had been baked and lashed with rain so many times since the night of the German air raid that it resembled something from a shipwreck, and when I took it in my hand, a piece tore away. I reached up to the gap.

‘What are you doing?’ I jerked my hand back and grabbed the sides of the ladder. Our young neighbour, Patricia, was framed by her open window.

‘I … there’s a birds’ nest.’

‘So?’

‘They were making a noise. Disturbing Hazel. Nick’s daughter.’

She looked doubtful. ‘Where is Dr Cawson?’ she asked. She had watched me and Tibbot leave the house yesterday. Someone might have told her to note down our comings and goings.

‘He’s at work.’

She crossed her arms. ‘I heard one of Churchill’s lying broadcasts coming from his daughter’s room. Through the wall. Do you let her listen to that rubbish?’

‘Oh, God, no. I’ll make sure that’s the last time.’

‘It was this morning. My husband said we should speak to you.’

‘Thank you. Yes. She’s just a girl, doesn’t know what she’s doing. I expect we were the same at her age.’

‘Were you?’

‘Oh, I was a horror. But thank you for letting me know. I’ll have a word with her.’ Go away, I wanted to shout at her. Just leave us alone.

‘She has read The Compass?’

‘Yes, she has. At school, of course,’ I said. That red paperback had never seemed so absurd to me as now.

‘Good.’ She paused and her face softened a little as she moved on to a new subject. ‘Will Lorelei Addington be coming again?’

‘I’m sorry?’ I asked hoarsely.

‘I saw her here when she came, oh, a few weeks ago.’ Her face broke into a smile. ‘She was my heroine when I was at school. Will she be coming again?’

I hoped Hazel wasn’t within earshot. ‘No. She won’t, I’m sorry, I have to –’

‘Did Dr Cawson give her the magazine?’

‘What magazine?’

‘She was in an old magazine I found, and I thought she would want it. I gave it to Dr Cawson to pass on to her. Did she get it?’

So it was this obsessed girl who was the source of the glossy publication I had found in Nick’s surgery before Lorelei’s death, the one that had made me imagine all sorts of false things.

‘I’ll see to it,’ I mumbled.

‘That would –’

‘I really must get on with this.’

A pregnant pause passed between us, but it meant that she finally got the message and left me to it. I thought about abandoning what I was doing and going back into the house, afraid of what she might know or say in one of her Party meetings, but I pressed on. Stretching as far as I could, I managed to touch the sharp corner of one of the bricks at the edge of the gap, yet couldn’t reach in any more than the sunlight could.

Back on the ground, I folded away the ladder and returned to the house. I couldn’t access that narrow space from the outside, but it struck me that it might be possible from within the house. Passing Hazel’s room, I made sure her door was closed, and then I entered Nick’s study. I had made a mistake, I realized, when I had searched through it previously for anything that the Secs would have wanted. I hadn’t thought of Lorelei’s house. She had had a hiding place in the ceiling of Hazel’s room. Wouldn’t Nick have one too? Rachel had been trying to tell me where it was.

The back wall of the study was hung with a couple of framed watercolours that Nick had said he valued because they were so astonishingly ugly that they demonstrated immense talent. I had laughed then. Now I lifted them away and smoothed my hand over the plastered wall. There was nothing. Neither was there anything of interest behind his writing desk or any indication of a ceiling cavity. I drew back the curtains and checked behind them – and my eye fell on something I hadn’t seen before. About half a metre up the wall, hidden behind the material, there was a large square wooden panel, with sides about forty centimetres long. I couldn’t recall seeing anything like it in any other room. I knelt down and felt around it.

The sound of movement from Hazel’s room made me stop. The subsequent silence told me that she wasn’t coming, however, so, after first taking the precaution of locking the study door to make sure, I went back to running my fingers around the wood. There was a hair’s breadth of a gap between it and the wall but the edge was too thin to get a grip on. I looked through Nick’s desk for something I could use to prise it away. An old pen with a steel nib looked like it might work, and I stabbed it into the thin gap, but the only effect, as I tried to lever the panel away, was to bend and snap the nib. I needed something more solid.

I hunted through drawers, tossing aside envelopes, an ashtray and a few notebooks. Then, at the back of one, I found what I needed: a brass ruler, tarnished at the edges and its numbers rubbed away, but fundamentally strong.

I returned to the floor and shoved the ruler in hard behind the wood. It went in only a few millimetres, though, and, try as I might, that produced no leverage. I grabbed a hardback book from Nick’s shelf – a medical textbook detailing the effects of hormones – and placed it against the end of the ruler. I shoved with all my weight and felt the brass slip in further, far enough to act as a lever. The wood didn’t want to move; it was jammed in tight; but, little by little, working the metal back and forth, and then doing the same on the opposite side, I managed to draw the panel slightly towards me and into the room. Eventually, I could grip it properly and rip it away, to leave a gaping, rough hole in the plaster and a little cloud of dust seeping through the air.

Was this it? I bent down to find a cavity wall, with two layers of bricks. The external layer was the one with the crack in it. Then there was the cavity, then the internal layer. Some of the bricks had been removed from the internal layer, giving access to the cavity from inside the house. The hole had then been covered by the wooden panel. It had been deliberate, I was certain of that.

I looked through into the cavity; yet, just as from the garden side, it was impenetrably dark, so I pulled over a reading lamp from the desk and shone it through, hoping there would be something there. I couldn’t see much – dirty bricks, the same mist of plaster dust that I had sent floating up and the skeletal timber frame. Pressing my face right to the hole to peer around, I could smell the damp air, mixed with the odour of mould.

And then there was sharp pain and confusion – something was screeching at me and clawing at my cheek, drawing blood. I cried out as I felt its talons across my skin and its wings beating at my face, and I fell backwards, knocking over the lamp and scrabbling away, to press my back against a bookcase. The screeching went on and on, as if it were in my head, and at the same time I could hear Hazel calling out my name and then come running and trying the handle, banging on the door. ‘It’s all right, Hazel. I’m fine. I just … dropped something. Silly of me,’ I managed to stutter.

‘Can I come in?’ she asked, hesitatingly.

‘No, I’m … It’s your father’s things. His private …’ And in the beam from the tumbled lamp, I caught sight of the glittering black eye of the bird that had scratched my cheek. I put my hand to the stinging wound. ‘Please, just go back to your room.’

She sounded doubtful. ‘All right.’

I stared at the bird. It was watching me through the gap in the plaster. And then it thrust its head through into the room and looked around, studying me with its head to one side, for a long while. I sat as still as I could, hoping it wouldn’t fly into the room. Then it jumped back into the darkness, out of my sight, and all I heard was its wings flapping against the bricks as it flew away into the open air.

Recovering myself, I crawled to the hole and righted the lamp. Very carefully this time, I placed my face back to the breach. With the light I could see a bit more. There was a nest made from twigs and rubbish that sat on one of the floorboards, and beside it a pale and misshapen thing that I couldn’t quite make out. It was about the same size as the nest, but not twisted together by a bird. Something man-made. I reached through, took hold of it and brought it back into the room.

On the floor in front of me, crumpled and empty, was a cardboard box similar to the one I had found in Lorelei’s hiding place. It was a little larger but otherwise the same: divided into small compartments just like the ones that had held rifle rounds during my basic training. I unfolded it and shook it out. The compartments were empty – or so I thought, until I noticed, wedged in at the bottom of one, a circular piece of thin glass with jagged edges reaching upwards. It had clearly been broken off a larger item. Stuck to it was a tiny slip of paper with a single typed word, the letters stretching right to the rough edge. I held it in my fingertips and read it out loud to myself, rolling it on my tongue to try to make sense of it: ‘Jacob’.

For a minute I remained still, hearing nothing. And then, with a rush of blood through my mind, I understood what I had missed.

I grabbed the stack of intimate letters from Lorelei that Nick had kept in his desk drawer. There was something in one that I needed to read again. I hunted through the lines about parties and acerbic comments about social climbers and fusty old men; declarations of love and laughing rejections of Nick’s ‘slushy’ replies; and finally I found the letter in which she mentioned the American wartime colonel who had asked her about the Reds embedding themselves in British society. I pulled it out and scanned it. The name I was looking for was there in blue ink, as dark as when she had written it.

I looked hard at the box – I had seen others like it far more recently than during my Compulsory Basic. Maybe this letter could save Nick. If I were right, he was guilty of a crime, but it was nothing like what the Secs thought.