by Gareth Rubin
‘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.
18
We walked quickly up the hill to find the railway line emerging around a corner. We bought two tickets at the station counter and sat in the small, empty waiting room. ‘My wife was from Kent,’ Tibbot said after a while. It was the first time he had spoken about her.
‘From near here?’
‘Quite near. Maidstone. She was devoted to Julie, of course,’ he added, as if he hadn’t stopped thinking of either of them for a second. ‘Poor flowers.’ I looked at him. I got the impression that he wanted to talk about it, but wasn’t used to it. He stared at the floor.
‘What do you mean?’
He shifted in his seat. ‘Julie, she … It was Elsa’s shift at the pub that she was going to when she was caught up in that demo. Elsa was poorly and I told Julie to cover it for her mum. She didn’t want to because she was going to meet some of her pals, but I said her mum would get into trouble with the landlord.
‘After it happened, Elsa and I never said anything, but I was always thinking, “If you hadn’t got ill” and she was always thinking, “If you hadn’t told her to take my place.” Well, you can’t stop those thoughts.’ He cleaned his glasses and pressed them back into place.
I thought about my own mum and dad. How they had always done their best for me and how their own lives had ended, like so many others, with the indignity of TB. Really, though, I should be thankful that at least I had had a chance to say goodbye to them. Millions over the past decade had never had that.
A youngish man with neat hair and shining shoes sat on a bench on the other side. Tibbot glanced at him and quietly suggested we wait out on the platform.
‘You’re a teacher, you said?’ he asked, as we emerged.
‘Yes. Only I haven’t worked for some time. No one will give me a job.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because I trained in the old era. I can’t be trusted. Do you know, there’s been a standing directive for a few y
ears: any children who were at school in the DUK before the Wall went up can’t be in the same class together because they could form factions and pollute the others? It just seems normal now. God, that’s awful.’
The train arrived and we boarded it. Tibbot was silent for a minute. Then he cleared his throat. ‘Look, Jane, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, but we’re crossing a line here. I can’t tell them I’m a copper so we won’t have that protection. If NatSec or whoever found out, we would be –’
‘I know what we would be.’ He didn’t need to warn me. Maybe as a policeman he didn’t experience the visceral fear that the rest of us had to live with. But it was as much as I could do not to catch the first train back to London and wait quietly at home for whatever was going to happen to me and Nick. ‘I was wondering,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘Back in Lorelei’s house, when we were looking at the posters, you started to tell me something but you stopped yourself. It was something you had seen in them.’
‘Did I? Oh, yes, something did occur to me. Those dates on the posters – they meant something but not just the code in the book. Something else.’ I waited again for him to explain. ‘It’s that they were all years ago. The last one was in ’48. No more in the last four years.’
‘So?’
‘Oh, twenty years ago it must be. I was sent to a house up in Golders Green. I was living north of the river then. Actress by the name of – I won’t forget it – Lillian Hall-Davis. She was a big star for a while. Silent era – before your time. Then the talkies came and the parts dried up. Well, poor girl did for herself. Do you think –’
‘Lorelei would never do something like that.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because she liked herself too much.’
It was fully dark when we alighted at a tiny station formed of nothing but a platform and a brick hut for the guard. The village it served was a vision of the rural England that used to be, and in my mind’s eye I could see old maids cycling to church, waving to mothers with prams, while the menfolk played cricket on the village green. There were pockets of that left, with the new way of life taking its time to creep out from the towns and cities, but there was talk now of collectivizing the last remaining private farms to make them fairer and more efficient – no longer would the farmer have a fat belly while the factory worker starved, they said.
Following directions that the station guard gave us, we picked our way along a country lane. The hedgerows eventually gave way to a high brick wall that we followed for a kilometre before it opened to show a large country house, the sort a wealthy industrialist might have retired to in the last century. Thousands of these grand homes had rotted away after the Great War had left their owners’ sons lying in shallow, muddy graves in Flanders and beside the Somme. Behind its closed wrought-iron gates we saw a little wooden gatehouse with a man inside dressed in a white uniform. He was reading the football reports on the back page of the Morning Star and looked up when I tried the gates. They were locked, I found. He slid open a window. ‘We’re looking for a Dr Larren. Is he here?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t seen him go out.’
‘But he does work here?’
‘He’s medical director.’ He was becoming curious about us.
‘Can you let us in, please?’ Tibbot said.
‘Visiting’s over. Unless you’ve got an appointment, you can’t.’
Tibbot pursed his lips. ‘It’s important.’ I knew he didn’t want to identify himself as a policeman.
The man was becoming irritated. ‘Then make an appointment.’
‘We don’t have time.’
He went back to his match reports. ‘That’s your trouble,’ he replied.
‘We need to see him now.’
He refolded the paper. ‘Piss off or I’ll call security.’
We had already been frustrated today and this seemed our last chance. ‘Police,’ I said.
Tibbot stared at me.
‘What?’ the man in uniform blurted out, looking up from the page.
‘He’s police.’
I could see Tibbot mentally calculating the danger of admitting who he was. If we tried to slope off now, the man might well call the local station straight away and that would set a dangerous train in motion.
‘Are you? Show me your warrant card.’ He was suspicious.
Stony-faced, Tibbot drew out his warrant card. ‘Here,’ he said. He indicated a telephone on the wall inside the gatehouse. He had to brazen it out now. ‘So we would like to see Dr Larren. That must be connected to the office, yes?’
The man still looked wary, but he took the telephone from the wall. ‘What name?’ he asked.
‘Detective Sergeant Tibbot.’
The man stabbed the single button on the telephone. Tibbot kept that stony look on his face. I tried to catch his eye, to let him know that I was sorry, but he stared straight ahead. ‘Police here to see Dr Larren. All right,’ the man mumbled into the receiver. ‘Asking him,’ he said to us.
I looked across to the house. ‘What kind of hospital is it?’ I said. Perhaps Rachel had been a patient here, and for some reason Larren had taken her car to keep in trust. That seemed strange, though.
The man in white stared at me. ‘Psychiatric.’
I gazed up at the wide building. I had never seen one before. It seemed so ordinary.
We waited a minute before the telephone squawked again. ‘He wants to know what it’s about,’ the man said, the receiver still by his chin.
Tibbot was annoyed, and I was sure much of the anger was for me. ‘Tell him it’s about a car he received in 1950. Police business.’
The man narrowed his eyes. ‘About a car he received in 1950. Yeah. I don’t know.’ We waited again.
‘You know what kind of people are in these places?’ Tibbot asked under his breath. ‘You know it’s not just for the sick now? There are … others.’ He looked at me to see if I understood.
I did. It was what was detailed on that samizdat leaflet that I had found beside Liberation Square. The commitment to provide healthcare for everyone, including those with mental illnesses, had suited the government in a way that was never made public but was whispered about. It was something else we had borrowed from the Soviet Union: dissident intellectuals – and sometimes trades unionists or general troublemakers – were dumped in places like this and doped up until their words died on their tongues. The hospitals had become an extension of the political process. The Communists had told us from the beginning that everything would soon be political, but we hadn’t fully understood them. We had thought it meant that the structures of society would be moulded to serve the public. We were – I was – beginning to understand that it meant that they would be bent to serve the requirements of politicians.
Eventually the telephone rang and the man in white put it to his ear. ‘All right.’ He placed the handset back in its cradle and looked us up and down, rubbing his palms over his hips. ‘What’s all this about a car?’ he asked.
‘I think you have to do as you’ve been instructed,’ Tibbot replied, pointing to the telephone.
The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’ll take you up.’
He unlocked the gate and led us up a long and winding gravel path to the twin-winged house. A very large ground-floor window on the left glared out light into the country evening. It held a number of faces staring out, hardly moving, while the corresponding window on the right showed only a smattering of faded furniture. Both were barred. With a clanking of locks from inside, the front door opened for us.
‘They’re to see Dr Larren,’ the gatekeeper told a heavy-set man wearing an identical uniform, before returning to his post.
The new man told us to follow him, closing and securing the door with a key from a large bunch hanging on his belt. He smelled like he hadn’t washed in a long time. ‘This way,’ he said.
We passed a heavy-looking door with a panel of wire-strengthened glass. It gave access to a corridor into t
he left-hand wing of the house. Next to it a security guard sat filling in some forms. The security was obviously tight, but still a thought arose: if Rachel had once been detained here, if her mind was unstable, could Lorelei have died under her hand?
We climbed a wide oak staircase scored with deep welts and approached a door of intricately carved wood, upon which the orderly thumped with his fist. From somewhere behind it, a voice told us to enter and we did so to find a short man in his shirtsleeves peering at us from behind a glass desk. ‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘I’m Dr Larren. I’m sorry I said I was busy, but there’s a lot to do right now. If I can help you, I will. You said something about a car?’
Tibbot showed him his warrant card. There was no use hiding it now. ‘You were given a car two years ago. Well, you took one, anyhow.’
‘I’m sorry, but no. No, I didn’t.’
‘Police records say you received a Sunbeam. Registration YXA 998.’
‘I don’t know what to tell you, Detective Sergeant, that’s not my car.’ He poured a glass of water and drank.
‘We’re trying to find the woman who owned it before you. Her name is Rachel Burton. Is she a patient?’
‘No. We don’t have any patient by that name.’
‘You’re certain?’ Tibbot asked.
‘Yes. We have fewer than forty patients. I know them all personally. I make a point of it. Only eight or nine have arrived in the past few years and she isn’t one of them.’
‘Could she have been here for a short time?’
‘Even then I would have known her.’
‘This is a most important enquiry.’
‘I’m sure it is, but I can’t help you.’
‘Could you ask your staff?’
He looked amused. ‘I’m afraid they would tell you the same thing.’
‘You can’t be certain of that.’
‘But I can, officer.’
‘Dr Larren …’
It was ridiculous and I could see no point going on with it. The man wasn’t going to tell us anything. ‘Look,’ I said to Tibbot. ‘Let’s leave this and just go. Please.’
Tibbot seemed frustrated. He checked his notebook, although it must only have been to give him a chance to gather his thoughts. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘The registration records must be a mistake. Thank you for your time.’