She works harder and more diligently than before. She still chats with Karen and the scientists and technicians, although not quite as much as she once did, and takes care to keep the biscuit tin stocked. Her typing is as slow and immaculate as ever, but something is different about her, although nobody can be quite sure what it is. She dyes her hair darker than normal, almost auburn, and even Max comments on it, telling her that she looks like Joan Crawford.
‘Do I?’
‘Is that who I mean? The pretty one.’
Joan laughs, but she does not blush as she might once have done. Her hand is no longer there to be brushed against, as if by accident, the way it used to be.
She knows that Max has put the change in her down to her father’s death, but Karen pooh-poohs this idea to anyone who will listen. She believes Joan has got herself a young man, and although Joan is embarrassed by this sudden universal interest in her private life, it is a useful cover story. She does not deny it outright and so it is assumed to be true. Karen seems to be genuinely delighted for her, having despaired of Joan ever finding a husband during the four years she has been at the laboratory, and this is matched only by her delight in having a fresh piece of gossip to impart when conversation dries up over morning biscuits.
‘Who is he then, this bloke who’s stolen your heart?’ Donald asks at the Friday night drinks after several weeks of speculation.
Joan flushes. ‘Donnie!’ she says, mock-bashful. Max is standing with his back to her, but she can see the side of his face in the mirror, a pinch of colour spreading across his cheeks.
‘No, go on. I want to hear all about him.’
Joan takes a sip of her port and lemonade. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘Hmm, well, I don’t believe that. But I don’t mind if you don’t want to tell me.’
Joan laughs. ‘I promise I’ll tell you when the time’s right. Just not now. Not yet.’
‘Don’t want to jinx it. I understand.’ He takes her glass from her. ‘Another?’
She shrugs. ‘All right then.’ She watches him disappear through the crowd to the bar, and turns to look in a small mirror on the wall beside her. A strand of hair has come loose from her hairclip, and as she reaches up to fix it, she sees Max watching her.
Nothing happens straight away, or at least nothing anyone could put a finger on with any certainty. A few seconds pass before he steps forward, turns her to face him, and takes the hairclip from her hand. ‘I hope this man, whoever he is, deserves you,’ he says gently.
Slowly, carefully, he slides the hairclip back into her hair and then tilts his head to check it is in the right place, and Joan feels a fierce, burning sensation rising up through her body. She watches him turn away and walk out of the pub, leaving his half-finished drink on the table next to her, and she feels lost.
But this is how it has to be. She has made her choice.
At the end of the month, she takes a train to Ely as arranged between her and Sonya, a brown envelope tucked under her arm. The envelope is sealed and addressed to a name Joan has taken from the phone directory at the laboratory and has committed to memory in case she is asked. The address is an amalgamation of different addresses for plumbers in the Cambridgeshire area. She sits next to the window with her bag clasped on her lap, waiting for a delayed signal to be put right so they can leave the station. She bends down to adjust her shoes and her head is dizzy when she sits up again at the sight of a policeman at the gates. Suddenly she wishes she had taken a taxi as Sonya instructed.
Please, she thinks. Please hurry up and leave. Her hands are gripping her bag and the fabric of its handle is hot and itchy where it touches her skin. She must keep hold of it in her right hand. Everything is fine. Nobody is following her. She checked this on the way to the station, doubling back on herself and popping into the chemist for a packet of cough drops, an accountable errand saved up for today. A convincing errand. She coughs, and clasps the handle of her bag more tightly.
The compartment is half full, busy with commuters wearing light summer jackets and pale-coloured ties, men who glance at her as they always do when she wears this particular shade of blue, hoping to catch her eye in an absent, questioning sort of way. It is not suspicious, just faintly sexual. Normally she would avert her eyes, but today she finds herself glancing back at these men, observing them, wondering if any of them suspect her. Are there any clues which might give her away? Does she look different from how she did before, when she was just another person going to work through the rubble like everyone else, pulling together, partaking in the war effort and wearing mittens over her chilblains?
A whistle blows at the same moment as the door to the compartment is flung open. A lady in a smart burgundy dress pushes her head into the carriage, looks around, and fixes her eyes on Joan. The woman is hot, breathless, holding a suitcase in one hand while pressing her hat onto her head with the other so that her hair is flattened and messy. Joan feels a squeezing sensation in her stomach.
‘Is this train going to Ely?’ The woman addresses Joan directly.
Joan’s instinct is to avert her eyes but she does not. ‘Yes.’
‘Wonderful.’ The lady steps up into the carriage and slams the door behind her just as the train starts to move. She sits next to Joan even though it is a bit of a squeeze and there is more space further along the bench. Her breath comes in heavy gasps, and she takes off her hat to fan herself. ‘Just in the nick of time,’ she says, nudging Joan.
Joan nods, smiles and looks away, relieved. Nobody seems to have noticed anything unusual. There are no policemen chasing the train, their clipped heels and whistles echoing through the fug of steam, no detectives in high-collared mackintoshes slipping along the glassy corridor. She knows she does not look suspicious. She looks clean and respectable. Not necessarily a church-goer—who is these days?—but her nails are buffed and clean, her hair is neatly pinned up. Sonya is right. She is the sort of person people choose to sit next to in train carriages. Who would ever suspect?
She feels a small tremor of excitement at what she has begun. She knows that there is nobody else who can do what she is doing, nobody else with the same level of access and knowledge.
Apart from Max, of course.
Is she frightened of getting caught? Yes, of course she is. If she stops to think about what she is doing, she is terrified. If she were caught, she would not tell, and she knows what this would mean for her. ‘Come on,’ they’d say when they came for her. ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing mixed up in something like this? Someone must have got you into it. We just need a name.’ But she would not give them a name, because the only names she has are Leo and Sonya.
And so she does not think about it, most of the time. Because she knows that once a thing has been done, it can never be undone. There is no going back. This is it.
WEDNESDAY, 12.02 P.M.
Evidence collected for the Prosecution in the case of R vs Kierl, December 1946
Between 1943 and 1946, the defendant had a number of meetings with a man he has described but who has not been identified. These meetings took place in a country road just outside Ottawa, Ontario, except for a few occasions when they met in a café opposite the Central Bus Station. The meetings were usually in the afternoon at weekends and the times were arranged to fit in with the trains from Montreal. The man always arrived and left by train.
He stated that this man was in his opinion an alien, although he spoke good English, this being the language in which his espionage transactions were carried out. He has described him as a slim, athletic man in his early thirties.
The material handed to this unknown contact consisted solely of carbon copies of his own papers, typed by himself or in manuscript and he says he passed on no work prepared by others or by himself in collaboration with others.
Although he has been shown a large number of possible photographs, he has b
een unable to identify any of them as that of the man in question, and without further information it seems improbable that this contact will be identified.
*
Nick has not spoken since his outburst. His expression is blank, numbed by shock. He starts now, and holds out his hand towards the file. ‘May I see?’
Joan watches her son’s eyes as he scans the sheet of paper Ms. Hart has given to him. She wishes she could have just a moment alone with him. He is impossible to read when he is like this, withdrawn into himself. If she could only speak to him away from the video recorder and these incessant questions, then she might at least have a chance to explain herself. She wills him to look up at her, just a glance, but his eyes are fixed to the sheet of paper.
‘You mentioned that you met Kierl in Canada. Did you have any notion then that he was sympathetic to the Russian cause?’
Joan shakes her head. ‘I didn’t ever really speak to him. He was a quiet sort of chap. Very highly regarded as a scientist though. I remember that.’
Ms. Hart nods, pursing her lips in that head-girl manner she occasionally adopts. ‘Well yes, and a very adept spy. He stole actual samples of uranium isotopes which were personally transported to Moscow by the ambassador.’
‘I remember.’
‘Must have scared you a bit. Lifetime imprisonment.’
The words hang in the air between them.
Joan hesitates. She remembers the headlines plastered across the newspaper stands as she cycled into the laboratories that morning. SPY TIPS OFF! SPY TELLS ALL!
She had braked abruptly, dropping her bike against the pavement so that her bag and umbrella fell out of the basket strapped to her handlebars, and a man stopped to help her gather her things and pull the bike out of the road so that it could rest against a bakery window while she bought a newspaper from the stand. She remembers how her fingers fumbled in her purse for change, clumsy and hot, and she recalls recognising Kierl in the photograph under the screaming headlines. According to the newspaper reports, MI5 and the Canadian police had been informed by President Hoover that there was a leak coming from somewhere in one of the atomic research units, and he had asked both the British and the Canadians to please investigate; Kierl had been decided upon by a process of elimination. Then came the details of his arrest, the tap at his bungalow door, the Canadian police officer asking if he might put a few questions to him.
Ah yes, Joan most certainly remembers reading about that.
Kierl was arrested later that night. The following morning he confessed to the crime of sending information to the Soviet Union. A windfall. There were protests at the time that the sentence was too harsh. He hadn’t been giving secrets to an enemy, after all. Russia was an ally at the time. Although, by 1946, this position was a little more ambiguous.
Joan looks at Ms. Hart. Her head thrums with exhaustion. There is no let-up from the relentless run of questions. She looks at her watch. Forty-seven hours until her name is released to the House of Commons, and until William’s cremation. Forty-eight hours until she has to make her statement to the press. She supposes that this is why they are mentioning Kierl now. To prepare her for what will happen to her.
‘Yes,’ she says eventually, and her voice is thin and uneven. ‘It did scare me a little.’
When she arrives at the laboratory, everyone is already there. They are gathered in Max’s room, standing, talking, reading aloud snippets from the newspapers. Donald is shouting something about the blasted Ruskis. Karen is positioned at the door, gesticulating to Donald that he needs to pipe down. Joan drops her bag at the cloakroom and goes in. Max is standing behind the desk, his shirt crumpled and his hair standing up in clumps, his eyes ringed by shadows. Their eyes meet across the room and there is, for a brief moment, a hint of the closeness they have lost, ignited by this reminder of their trip to Canada, before he coughs, looks away, and raises his hands in an attempt to get everyone’s attention.
‘You all know why we’re here,’ he says. ‘You’ve all read the papers.’ He dips his head and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘I don’t know what to say. I feel . . . ’ He stops.
‘Pissed off?’ Donald ventures.
Max nods, but he does not smile. ‘That’d be putting it mildly.’
Silence hangs in the room. There is the atmosphere of a siege, of being listened to, which means that nobody quite knows what to say. Eventually Karen speaks. ‘Did they come here too? Were we under investigation?’
Max looks up. ‘I expect so.’ He raises his hands again to calm the chatter this response provokes. ‘I think we all need to just get on as normal, as much as we possibly can. There’s going to be a bit of press attention and I believe the police are on their way here now, but it will pass. It’ll be worse at the laboratories in Brum.’
‘Everything’s worse in Brum,’ Karen interjects from the doorway.
‘So we just carry on as if nothing has happened?’ Donald asks irritably.
‘Well, nothing has happened, as such,’ Arthur says. ‘They still can’t make the bomb based on the information he’s given them. We haven’t even done it yet.’
‘No. But what’s the point in making it if they’re going to have it too? Stalin will blow us all up before we get the chance to stop him.’
‘All right, all right, Donnie. That’s enough gloom and doom for today,’ Karen calls out. ‘Joan, come over here and let’s do the tea.’
Max smiles gratefully at Karen. ‘Fine, meeting closed then. Motto for the day is to be cooperative when the police turn up, show them we’ve got nothing to hide, and keep buggering on. I think that’s all we can do.’ He pauses. ‘And be extra vigilant, extra careful. I want cupboards locked, no documents left out overnight, no idle talk. All those war mottos still apply to us.’
‘Right, boss.’
There is a palpable release of tension as everybody turns to leave and resume business as normal.
Oh, what an effort it is for Joan to move slowly, to give the impression that she is as stunned as the rest of them (which she is, in a way), and that she has no reason to rush. But it is hard to stop herself from moving fast. She feels giddy and out of control, as if she is careering downhill and the grass is slippery underfoot, too steep to stop. It is almost a reflex, this urge to put her hands out to protect herself. There are so many things she needs to do. Get to the meeting room. Find that brown envelope that she has already addressed to the fictitious plumber and then left, stupidly, carelessly, on the sideboard under a tray, stuffed full of duplicated documents. And then there is the camera, tucked away in the tea tin, just as it always is. Yes, she knows they are unlikely to look in there, but if they did it would be quite a find: a small camera containing a roll of film with close-up snaps of the reactor design.
‘Joan, would you mind staying here for a minute?’
Her heart stops in her chest. ‘I . . . erm . . . have some things to sort out.’
‘This won’t take a minute.’
She has no choice. She stops, letting the others file past her while her thoughts flit between the envelope of documents and the camera. How can she have got so careless? So reckless? Did she think she was invincible? She waits for everyone else to leave and then closes the door and goes to sit in the chair opposite Max. He is sitting at the desk, idly doodling on a file with his fountain pen.
‘So, our friend Kierl was more of a slot-machine than we thought,’ he begins, glancing up and giving Joan a rueful half smile before continuing with his doodle. ‘That’s quite a windfall.’
Up close, his skin is as oyster-shell pale as she remembers. The memory brushes uneasily against her thoughts of the envelope and camera. ‘What did you want to ask me?’
He looks up, his mind evidently distracted, because a few seconds pass before he is able to speak. ‘I’ve been asked to submit a report of our thoughts on Kierl in Canada. Any conversa
tions we had with him, any comments he made, any allusions as to his contacts.’ He pauses. ‘I’ve done an initial draft which I’d like you to read over.’ He pushes a piece of paper across the table to her. ‘It doesn’t really say anything they don’t already know, but just add anything you can think of.’
Joan nods. ‘Right.’
‘It needs to be finalised as soon as possible so before midday would be ideal. Just think about anything he might have said. I’m not expecting anything dramatic.’
‘I hardly spoke to him.’
‘I know.’ Max pauses. His eyes are fixed on the doodle in front of him and he doesn’t raise them to meet hers when he speaks. ‘There’s something else as well.’
Joan takes a shallow breath. ‘Yes?’
‘I’ve been given a list of potential suspects identified in Canada who might have been Kierl’s contact.’ He taps the table with his pen. ‘One of the names on it, Leo Galich, was associated with you when you started here. I’m afraid I have to ask: did you see him when we were in Canada?’
Joan’s heart freezes in her chest, starting again with an almost painful thump. Does he already know? Is that why he’s asking? Could he have spotted Leo following her into the ladies’ lavatory? No, she thinks, Max wouldn’t have recognised Leo then. Even if he has seen a photograph now, it wouldn’t make any difference. Slowly, she shakes her head.
Max is watching her carefully. ‘He was the one though, wasn’t he?’
Her tongue feels as if it has become swollen with air, a great ball of puffed-out flesh. ‘The one what?’
‘The one you mentioned on the boat. The one who didn’t ask.’
It takes Joan a few seconds to figure out this reference, and when she does the realisation is devastating and sweet all at once. She nods. ‘Yes, but it was a long time ago. I’m surprised you remember that.’
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