Liberation Square

by Gareth Rubin

  So it had all fallen into place. Medical drugs. Everyone knew that the Americans had treatments years ahead of our own – antibiotics to fight infection, and medicines for your heart or blood – and this man, Jacobson, was offering them to Lorelei. Nick must have read and reread her letter, weighing the possibilities and the dangers. Even before the Soviets’ arrival, it had taken years before American drugs had become legal here, and after our new friends arrived there hadn’t been a hope in hell of getting them.

  Grest examined the letter slowly and carefully. I could see him considering what I was saying. Would he be convinced by it? It wasn’t conclusive proof, no, but it all seemed a damn sight more likely than Nick working for the CIA. ‘Has he told you something like this?’ I asked.

  He gazed at me for a long time. ‘I haven’t spoken to him – it’s someone else’s case. But I haven’t heard anything about this.’

  ‘The other officer. Is he junior to you?’

  ‘As it happens.’

  ‘So you can take over the case?’

  He brushed some dust from the desk. ‘If I want to. Tell me more about this supposed activity of theirs.’

  ‘They’ve been doing it for years. I think they were selling some to patients, and some was going to Party officials.’

  Grest sneered a little as if the very idea were absurd. ‘Which Party officials?’

  I held my nerve. ‘Tim Honeysette. Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of Food. He tried to buy some from me yesterday.’ I felt guilty handing over his name – he had only bought whatever it was Nick was supplying him with – but I had no other way of getting Nick out of there.

  There was a pause. ‘Impossible,’ Grest replied. But I knew he had believed me. ‘And what was he trying to buy?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  The book had detailed the trade, each section noting a batch of orders smuggled from America. The first column, I knew, listed telephone numbers for the buyers. That was how they were identified. Then the second column, a string of three letters, probably recorded what they had ordered, but I couldn’t decipher it. ‘It cost ten pounds, though, and he might do you a favour or two if you let Nick out to keep up the supply.’ He sat back and stared at me again. Most NatSec officers were true believers and Nick couldn’t have approached them with such a confession and offer. But Tibbot had already told me that Grest had a history of looking the other way in return for a few quid. And here I was, also dangling before him the prospect of entry to the Closed Shops. ‘It can all be confirmed by a woman called Rachel Burton. She’s in a hospital in Kent. She was part of the group. There will be other buyers too. Maybe in the Ministry of Justice.’

  ‘Who?’ The prospect of rapid promotion was the most magnetic to him.

  ‘I don’t know. You’ll have to find out.’

  ‘How did they bring in the medicines?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I see.’

  I gained a little courage. ‘My husband isn’t working for the CIA. I don’t know why you ever thought he was – you half heard something somewhere and came to the wrong conclusion.’

  He waved away my words. ‘Can you get me the details – where they came from, who they were going to?’

  ‘No, only my husband could do that.’

  ‘If you’re lying to me, Mrs Cawson, it will go hard with you, and with your husband,’ he said. I nodded. He shifted in his seat. ‘This Comrade Honeysette. Did he approach you?’

  ‘No, I went to his house.’

  A flicker of surprise. ‘How did you know he was buying from your husband?’ I hesitated. I didn’t want to mention the ledger unless I had to – I wanted to keep a bargaining chip for later in case Grest went back on his word and kept Nick in custody. If I told him, he would demand I hand it over and then I would have nothing if he reneged on the deal.

  ‘I heard him and Nick talking about it once,’ I said.

  He thought it over, drumming his fingers on the desk, before seemingly coming to the conclusion that it was at least worth considering. ‘Wait here.’ He left the room and locked it from the outside. There was a window with wire mesh over it, and I looked out to the street. People on the other side of the road stared up at the edifice, not seeing me. I knew everything that they were thinking, though.

  Somehow I felt that I was betraying Tibbot by keeping all of this from him; but he really was better off not knowing. Good, sad Frank Tibbot could go back to his quiet life and retire, never having got revenge for his daughter’s death, but all the safer for it. And I felt sorry for Rachel too. Like the dissidents, she had been dragged to an insane asylum to keep her quiet. No one listens to the mad.

  I sat there for more than an hour, hearing that harsh building’s distant sounds, until, finally, I heard a key rattle in the lock. Grest came back into the room, carrying a folder of documents. ‘Your husband will be released,’ he said.

  I gasped. The joy I felt was as if I were the one being pardoned from a death sentence, not him. ‘When?’ I asked, jumping up.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Why not today?’

  He snorted. ‘There was a set-to with one of our guards. Stupid, really. Especially when Hopkins broke his wrist in return.’

  I was secretly a little proud of Nick. ‘But what’s that got to do with releasing him?’

  ‘You don’t understand how this works, do you? If he had just kept a hold of himself, I could have been able to get him out today. But Hopkins might object if your husband walks out of here without a bit of a stay in the cells to teach him a lesson. You don’t want to draw any undue attention right now.’

  ‘Will he be all right? You need him too.’

  ‘Hopkins and a couple of the others will stop by to make him understand. Nothing too serious. I’ll make sure he can stand at the end of it.’ I felt something harden in the pit of my stomach. ‘Now go home. You’ll see him tomorrow.’ He opened the door for me. ‘By the way’ – he checked one of the documents he was carrying – ‘it’s not really “Lorelei”. It’s “Anne”. “Anne Addington”. It seems she changed it.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘No.’ I wondered how many conversations like this had taken place there. Deals done. He examined me for a long time. I started to feel nervous again. ‘Some of my colleagues,’ he said. ‘They hate people like you. Doctors, their wives.’ We waited like that for a while before he gestured to the exit.

  As soon as I got outside, a wave of relief broke over me, stronger than anything I had experienced in my life, and I cried out, laughing and clasping my hands together like a child. I didn’t care about the strange looks I was gaining, I had never felt such elation. There was a busker playing old folk songs in the corner – badly. I gave him the entire contents of my purse. ‘Good luck, lady,’ he said, scooping up the cash. ‘Good luck to you!’

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied. But before I could go home and wait excitedly for Nick’s return, there was something else I needed to do.

  Nick’s safety had been everything for me. But now that I could almost feel him back with us, my mind turned to a different task, one that touched on my own safety rather than his. I was determined to recover the final memories of how Lorelei had died. Because someone had been there that day – I had seen them in the mirror – and whoever they were, they had let the suspicion of her death fall on us. What if they came back, preferring to see us all buried or imprisoned rather than able to expose them?

  There was something I had once seen on a newsreel. A doctor had explained different methods of treating soldiers who had been badly affected during the War. One technique forced them to confront fears and situations that they had been shying away from in civvy street. It seemed to work for them, so I hoped it would work for me.

  And so I stood again on the threshold of Lorelei’s black-and-white-tiled bathroom, with my hand on the cold copper bath. The taps were stiff and it took much of my strength to turn them, until the freezing water burst out, rising rapidly whi
le I turned my attention to the radio set in the corner. The face glowed for a moment when I flicked the switch, before light music played, and a woman’s voice was heard, talking about her day. It wasn’t Lorelei but, somehow, the more I listened, the more it seemed to become her voice, glistening like ice.

  The level in the tub was lifting, and I felt my pulse speed as I forced myself to drift back. It began slowly, but, little by little, I felt the past seeping in, until I was behind the house again, opening the back gate into the dank garden, weeds pulling at my feet; stalking like a ghost through the kitchen that she never used; climbing the stairs, sure that Nick was with her; hearing a man’s voice and her sharp laughter in reply. I felt every creak of the stairs, every step bringing me closer to her. Now my head was pounding, and the tide of the water was brushing the top of the bath. I gazed at it and heard a cold waterfall spill out and hit the floor, spreading across the tiles.

  I fixed Lorelei’s image in my mind then: the beauty, the arrogance. My eye fell on the gilt-edged mirror and I could just make out a form reflected in it, dark and indistinct. It was coming closer to me. But, as I stared at the blurred movement, something changed, something was very different. And in a moment I realized: I knew that this was no memory of the day she died. The cold air that I felt clutching my skin and the dark reflected image filling my sight were both there in the present moment.

  I spun around to see a face I knew well, choking at the sight of it. Then something slammed into my cheek and I was in the air, tumbling across the room, feeling only fear and an arc of movement.

  A noise rang out as the back of my head hit something hard and metallic – the bath – and everything was confused and there was water. The whole world seemed to be spinning. The tunnel of my sight told me that I was on the floor, looking down at a seeping flood.

  Grest bent down to me. I could smell his sweat, just as I had when he had pressed his chest against mine in the thin blue light of the NatSec van, just as I had in that locked interview room at 60 Great Queen Street. His flesh was so close I could see the wrinkles in his skin. His lips parted. ‘Give me the book or you end up like her,’ he said quietly.

  24

  Grest was all that I could see. He stood up, flexed his fingers and shook his hand – the knuckles were red where he had punched me. ‘It hurts me when I hurt you,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to do it again. There’s no need for it if you just give me the book.’

  I lay there, unable to move. We imagine that at times of great fear our limbs will tear us away, but too often they lock us where we are. I could no more move than if I had been chained down.

  He was looking straight down at me. His fingers balled into a fist once more. ‘Mrs Cawson, you just need to give me the book and you’ll be safe. Your husband and stepdaughter will be safe.’ He began to crouch down to me again. ‘Mrs Cawson, do you want them to be safe?’

  ‘Yes,’ I croaked. ‘Please.’

  ‘Then you know what to do.’

  Yes, I knew. ‘The book.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I haven’t got it here,’ I said.

  ‘Then where is it?’

  ‘I can get it. I can get it for you.’ I was shattered into pieces. I would have said or done anything to make him leave me alone.

  ‘Then we’ll –’

  And then the world shook again, and his arms stretched out like wings, falling down, towards me, towards the tiles. I twisted to the side as his waist fell on to mine, thudding the air from me, and his cheek cracked against the floor just centimetres from my own, to make the tiles judder. His eyelids dropped.

  ‘Jane?’

  I turned my head and saw someone else standing where Grest had been. ‘Are you all right?’ Tibbot was breathing heavily and gripping his truncheon, one of the heavy wooden ones that the older policemen had kept from the days before the Soviets came. He dropped to his knees and pulled Grest’s body from mine. ‘Jane, are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘I … think so.’ The impact of Grest’s body had left me winded, but no worse than that, I thought.

  He pulled Grest’s head up before throwing it back down with a thump. Blood dripped from the Sec’s nose, swirling into the flowing water. Tibbot took a pair of handcuffs from his jacket, quickly locking Grest’s wrists behind him, before helping me to my feet. Spots of light seemed to fly around the room, but my mind began to focus better.

  ‘What happened?’ he said, as he turned off the taps and put his hands underneath Grest’s shoulders, dragging him out to the landing. But I couldn’t immediately answer him. ‘Jane, what’s going on?’ he asked again, frustrated by my lack of reply. He pushed Grest against the solid bannister, where he used the Sec’s belt to bind his ankles tightly together.

  I took a moment, trying to order my thoughts. ‘It must have been him,’ I said. ‘No one else knew about the book. He killed her.’

  Tibbot looked Grest up and down. I saw a hardness in Tibbot’s eyes that I hadn’t caught before. It seemed to come from what he had lived through, what he had lost. I had seen a quiet sadness, but this cold determination was new to me. Perhaps it had always been there and I just hadn’t perceived it. Something else we were all hiding.

  ‘Go into the bedroom,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Why?’ He shook his head. I could guess why he didn’t want me here. ‘No, I’ll stay.’

  ‘When it gets too much, go into the bedroom.’ He stood rubbing his limbs. He hoisted Grest up and slapped his face a few times, until Grest started to whimper and turn away from the light blows. ‘I’m glad you’re awake,’ said Tibbot. ‘It makes it easier.’ He stabbed Grest hard in the ribs with his truncheon. The Sec cried out in pain and struggled. ‘Probably cracked one,’ Tibbot said. ‘I’ll do them all soon. You’ve seen it from the other side. You know what it looks like.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ Grest mumbled.

  Tibbot shoved him back on to the bare floorboards, took his truncheon and placed it across Grest’s throat. He put his hands on each end and leaned on it, choking him. Grest tried to squirm away, but he was pinned too tightly and his eyelids fell. ‘You think that worries me?’ He lifted the truncheon. ‘What did you do to Lorelei Addington?’ Grest drew in air with a hollow, rattling sound. ‘What was it? Did you hold her under the water? Was that what you did?’

  The Sec didn’t answer. The loathing that I felt for him – he seemed less than human to me now – worked against the aversion I felt for the violence.

  Tibbot stood up. ‘All right. You know, I haven’t been trained in this, like you have. Me, I arrest people who steal from their neighbours, or sell a few black-market tins of peas from their cars. So I don’t really know what I’m doing with you.’ He took his truncheon and brought it down on Grest’s chest. ‘Your heart’s right where I hit you. Can that cause a heart seizure? I don’t know. But you’re young and fit, so you can probably take it.’ He rubbed his brow. Grest’s lips seemed to be searching for something to say. ‘There’s a science to it, isn’t there? Things that the Nazis developed and the Russians borrowed. And they passed it on to you. I don’t know about that. I’m as likely to kill you as get the truth out of you.’ I couldn’t tell if Tibbot’s words were empty threats or if I had never really known him and what he was capable of. I hated the man on the floor, but the prospect of being there when he was killed made me stop and take a step back.

  ‘Nothing to say? All right.’ Tibbot went to the top of the stairs and looked down. ‘We’ve got days. I could call in sick to work, spend a week here working on you. Leave you sitting in your piss all day, all night. You haven’t told anyone you’re here, we know that.’ He walked back and sat down with his back against the wall. For a while there was just the sound of Grest’s laboured breath. ‘My daughter died because she couldn’t breathe.’ He looked down at his hands and the truncheon he was holding.

  The adrenalin subsiding, I turned to stare at the wall, but I couldn’t help glancing back to see Tibbot sit Gr
est up again so that the back of his head was against the bannister. He smacked Grest across the bridge of the nose with the butt of the truncheon – not a hard blow, but enough to make Grest’s eyes stream with water. Then he pulled back his arm, ready to strike him fully across the face.

  I wanted it to stop then and there. I rushed over, pulled Tibbot’s hands away and dragged Grest’s head up. ‘Tell us!’ I cried.

  Tibbot thrust me aside roughly and grabbed Grest. ‘I’m telling you now.’ Tibbot shook his head. ‘I’m telling you now that this time, when I start, I’m not going to stop. I’m too fucking tired of this.’ Grest twisted his face up. ‘So now, for the last time, I swear it’s for the last time, what did you do to Lorelei Addington?’

  Grest held his gaze on Tibbot. His chest rose and fell with rasping air. His lower lip was split and a line of blood was running from it. ‘Held her under the water,’ he mumbled.

  Tibbot wiped his face with his sleeve. He stood silent for a long time, collecting himself. ‘What did you want from her?’

  Grest shut his eyes. ‘The medicines.’ He slowly licked his lips.

  ‘What medicines?’

  ‘Antibiotics. Other stuff.’

  ‘American medicines,’ I said. Tibbot stared at me. God, I had been a fool. I had sat there in a blank room with Grest, telling him things he already knew. It probably took all his effort not to laugh at me. What he had wanted all along was the book. And then I had blundered in and presented an easy way to find what he wanted. He had followed me right to where he thought I had it stowed. After that he could have done to me what he had done to her.

  I told Tibbot everything. When I had finished, his head dropped and he sighed, as if knowing what lay behind it all made him weep. Somehow it seemed so tawdry. All this because they wouldn’t let us import the medicines we needed. I spoke to Grest. ‘Then you got what you came for. You took the drugs. The book was there too – if you wanted it, why did you leave it?’ He turned his head to one side and said nothing.