by Gareth Rubin
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t be of help.’ Larren picked up a pen and returned to some papers on his desk.
Tibbot followed me out of the room and we were met by the orderly, who was waiting to escort us out of the building. As we went, I noticed how thin the staircase carpet was – little more than threads.
I turned to the orderly. ‘Oh, I forgot to ask Dr Larren to do something.’ He looked at me with little interest. ‘Could you give a message to my cousin?’
His shoes were canvass, despite the cold and the fact that he seemingly had to tramp along country lanes to the hospital. ‘Who’s your cousin?’ he replied.
‘Rachel Burton.’
He glanced at the corridor to the other wing. ‘All right.’
I felt a jolt of adrenalin but managed to stay composed. ‘Just say Jane was sorry she couldn’t stay. I’m feeling ill.’
‘All right.’
We reached the lobby. ‘Oh, she’ll be so disappointed, though,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any way of just saying a quick hello to her on my way out?’
He stopped and something seemed to occur to him. ‘Past visiting time now. Shouldn’t, really.’
‘Yes, of course. It’s a trouble for you. Perhaps I could pay you for your time.’ I reached into my handbag and took a pound note from my purse. The orderly stared at it, then at the security guard, who was watching us. I added another note, and clipped my purse closed to show him that there would be no more forthcoming. The guard went back to filling in his forms.
‘Just for a minute, no more,’ Tibbot said, cajoling him.
The orderly swiftly stuffed the money in his pocket. He would buy the guard a drink later, no doubt. He unlocked the door to the corridor and took us to what I suspected was the room we had seen from outside the house, with the faces staring out on to the lawn. ‘Be quick,’ he said, as we stood on the threshold. ‘A minute tops.’
‘Thank you so much.’ I was trying to appear calm and not too excited.
It was a linoleum-floored lounge with many small tables and hard seats. An unpleasant odour, like distant rotting fields, hung over the scene, emanating from a mass of dirty tin plates and wooden cutlery on the tables. The meagre remains of a meal were festering while twenty or thirty people, men and women, murmured or read battered magazines and paperbacks. Some of them had copies of Blunt’s The Compass – doing so probably curried favour with the hospital authorities. A few posters of his image, emblazoned with quotations from his book, formed the room’s only decoration, and below one such bill a heavyset nurse sat listening to gentle music drifting from a speaker.
She looked up as Tibbot and I entered, confused by our presence, but the orderly lifted his palm to say it was all right and I rapidly glanced through the room for any sign of the handsome young woman from the photograph in Nick’s study. I must have stood stock still for a while, because the orderly spoke again. ‘Go on, then, hurry up,’ he said tetchily.
Unable to see her, but desperate to find her, I had to throw caution to the wind. ‘Rachel Burton?’ I called out, hoping she was there somewhere. The orderly looked startled, confused by what I was doing. ‘Is Rachel Burton here?’ The murmuring fell away and everyone turned to look. The orderly realized something was wrong and tried to take hold of my arm, but I rushed into the centre of the room, hoping someone would reply. ‘Rachel!’ There was silence as all those faces looked blankly at me. The nurse shook herself into action and jumped up. ‘Rachel Burton!’
Then, in a blur, the orderly was making for me, but Tibbot got in his way and they smacked against one of the seats, struggling. The nurse ran towards them too, sending a tray of food crashing to the floor, until Tibbot drew out his warrant card. ‘Police,’ he shouted. ‘Let go.’ The man did as Tibbot commanded, and there was an eerie sort of calm as we all stood facing each other.
The silence was punctuated by a quiet voice, timid as a shrew’s, almost too timid to be heard. ‘Over there,’ it said. It was an old woman with straggling, near-transparent hair, thinning on the top. ‘She’s over there. Rachel.’
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.�
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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.
20
We found an empty carriage on the train back to London. You could tell by the leather seats that it had once been First Class, although those distinctions had been among the first casualties of the new order, and now we could all sit where we chose. Cheap and reliable transport for everyone was so important to the Soviets.
And yet the London transport system had proved more treacherous than they had expected. A few days after the first fence went up along what was to become the route of the Wall, hundreds of people sped beneath it from our side to the other in tiny, underground carriages. It wasn’t through the Tube – the Soviets had stopped those trains – but rather the little Post Office Railway, the network for delivering mail that the Reds knew nothing about until one of their friends in the Royal Mail ran to the Soviet HQ and told all. Their troops caught scores of people that day – men, women and children. They were lucky to get just a few weeks each in Brixton Prison – those who tried after, through the sewers or by climbing, usually got six months in solitary.