Grace E-Book

Maggie Gee

• Herausgeber: Telegram Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Paula is a victim of mysterious harassment. She lives near the railway line that carries nuclear waste through the heart of London and feels curiously, constantly unwell. Grace, her remarkable eighty-five-year-old aunt, deplores the evils of the modern world. When she, too, is plagued by silent phone calls, she escapes to Seabourne on the South Coast, where nothing ever happens except quiet deaths and holidays. Bruno is a sexually quirky private detective who attacks daisies with scissors, germs with bleach and old ladies for fun. If he follows Grace to Seabourne, can anything save her? Inspired by the real-life murder of anti-nuclear protester Hilda Murrell, Grace is a breathtaking thriller that asks whether, in a bankrupt, dishonest, security-mad Britain, courage and love still count for something. 'Excellent' The Times 'Heart-stoppingly exciting' Time Out 'Maggie Gee's excellent novel treads a sure path between love and fear, taking as its starting point sinister and secret happenings in contemporary England. I read it twice, and it was even better the second time.' Anita Brookner, The Spectator 'Full of poignancy and power.' Jeannette Winterson

Leseprobe

Maggie Gee

Grace

TELEGRAM

Praise for Grace

‘Heart-stoppingly exciting.’

Time Out

‘Controlled and highly imaginative … this exceptional novel should be read everywhere.’

Literary Review

‘Magically, I finished this book with the almost cheerful feeling that things are still hopeful as long as people answer back and write as well as this.’

The Guardian

‘Excellent.’

The Times

‘Maggie Gee’s excellent novel treads a sure path between love and fear, taking as its starting point sinister and secret happenings in contemporary England. I read it twice, and it was even better the second time.’

Anita Brookner, The Spectator

‘Full of poignancy and power.’

Jeanette Winterson,

Sunday Times

This book is dedicated, with love and gratitude, to my friend Beverly Hayne who died in 1986; and to my daughter Rosa who was born in the same year.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Bridget Barrett, Martin Booth, Gary Murray for his technical advice, the London Nuclear Information Unit, Trina Rankin and Daphne Youles.

Most of all she is grateful to Commander Rob Green, Hilda Murrell’s nephew, for his kindness after the book was published.

Who Killed Hilda Murrell? is by Judith Cook and was published in 1985 by the New English Library; No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth is by Rosalie Bertell and was published in 1985 by The Women’s Press.

1

One

A man holding a child. In the morning, in a green urban garden. A little girl, with white feathers of hair, hanging upside-down and laughing wildly through her father’s legs, shrieking with pleasure, miles from the ground because Arthur is tall, crinkling her pale blue eyes at the sun. She fights him off as he tickles her but her strong short calves cling on for dear life. Then she stops laughing, and dangles, wide-eyed, arching her back to look at the ground, wondering if it’s a different world, where flowers hang down from a sky of grass.

Paula, who loves the little girl’s father, watches the two of them through glass, and in that instant is pierced with envy. Maybe that was why people had kids. To be part of something else, part of each other Briefly, the two of them are one ... but Paula has no children.

Then they split apart, Sally shrieks as she lands, Paula leaves the window, life goes on, Arthur bends to frown at a snail; ordinary life in a dirty city, blowing apple-blossom, scraps of paper.

The following night, the world grew dirtier.

2

At Home and Abroad

‘... unconfirmed reports ... abnormally high ... over 100 times ... in Sweden,’ the radio said. Grace was at home, sitting in the sun by some bright yellow tulips, listening to Mozart. It seemed such a long way away. Grace was eighty-five, she lived in the country, the tulips were blinding sunshine-yellow. Next day, the reports were confirmed.

There was nowhere, really, to hide. Because air is everywhere and goes everywhere. Air from the inner city, air from the chemical plants, air from Russia, that spring.

She would soon retire after a lifetime of work. Though a lot of life was disappointment, it was worth going on with to the last. There was Paula, her niece. There was her garden. At the heart of all, there were her memories of Ralph. Despite her years, she could still feel young. But they said radiation aged everyone and everything.

Grace had tried to understand. In the wind that was shaking the creeper, in the April rain and sun, through curtains, windows, walls, and her thin hand pressed to the window-pane, through flesh and blood and bone it fell.

Yet part of her didn’t believe it. It couldn’t be seen or heard or tasted; the ordinary senses let one down. Was it really there then, the radiation, that nervous, whispering spring? Was it in the ordinary green leaves and the ordinary milk at breakfast?

Later there were ‘facts’ about Chernobyl. The fire was so hot that the plume of radiation was carried up thousands of feet, and blew far and wide over Europe. Radioactive fallout came down again in the rain. In Norway and Sweden, it fell on the fruits of the forest; small yellow cloudberries, lingonberries, Arctic raspberries. It fell on moss and lichen.

Lichen eats water, like a sponge. Reindeer eat lichen. Reindeer meat would for many years be too contaminated for humans to eat.

Human beings are enterprising. They thought they would feed the meat to mink on mink farms. They were doomed to die, after all. Gleaming, radioactive mink.

Paula Timms, Grace’s niece, is thirty-seven, but today she feels fifty. She sits on an old pink blanket in her boyfriend’s garden in London, beside a pile of paper. The pen which lies uncapped on the blanket has been there so long it has dried in the sun.

She is trying to write a novel about a brave old woman. She has written several plays, but this is her first novel. It raises particular problems because her central character is based on life. And death; a real-life murder. Hilda Murrell was murdered two years ago in Shrewsbury, aged seventy-eight.

Paula knew as much about the real Hilda Murrell as you could learn from books and newspapers. Hilda was a passionate rose-grower; unmarried; tall; a conservationist; an ‘English lady’; ‘full of life’; a strong protester against nuclear power. Some facts are neutral, others are not. Paula has stared at photographs, all giving different messages. A kind face, an austere face, a mischievous face, a demure face. In the end it’s just a face, and the facts are insufficient. The live woman escapes Paula. She tries to imagine her, but Grace’s image floats up before her and confuses the issue.

Hilda wouldn’t talk, or smile. In her place, Grace smiled, confusingly.

Besides that, Paula isn’t feeling well. She isn’t well, or the world isn’t well. The sunlight tells her not to blame the world, not that she believes the sunlight. Just below the top of Arthur’s kitchen window, three brilliant camellias bob. She watches them a moment, now crimson, now dull as the leaves slide over and under the flowers. She sees that they are beautiful, but the pleasure doesn’t enter her. They are right and she is not. Or perhaps they only look right.

She has tried to explain it to Arthur, but she can’t explain what she doesn’t understand. All she is sure of are the contradictions. She is hungry all the time; food makes her sick. The taste of things has changed. She is bloated, although she is eating less. She is tired, although she does nothing. She goes to bed early and wakes up exhausted. She falls asleep when she tries to write her book, but lies there in the small hours with her mind racing through it ... She is always drenched in sweat.

She looks down at her naked arms and legs. They are yellowish-white against the pink of the blanket. It isn’t a pleasant sight. Since Chernobyl, she’s avoided the sun; she is normally brown as a nut by now. It strikes her her flesh has precisely the tinge you saw on the faces of teenage girls throwing up on the cross-channel ferry. And the blanket is pink as the skin on blancmange, an unnatural colour, pink and wrinkled. Suddenly something violent is happening, inside her, outside her, all through her; a very loud silence is ringing in her ears and something is rising, cramping and rising, her whole insides are surging together and on a great wave of relief and panic she bends and is horribly sick on the teapot. She looks up briefly, then retches again.

Little Sally is watching her, paddling down the lawn at just the right moment to catch the action. ‘You been ‘ick,’ the two-year-old crows. ‘Dirty Paula, you been ‘ick!’

‘Go away,’ yells Paula, gagging, running out of breath in the middle of the yell. ‘Somebody’s fucking poisoning me.’

‘Someb’y fucking,’ Sally nods wisely. ‘Someb’y fucking Paula.’

Probable Health Effects Resulting from Exposure to Ionising Radiation

10–50 rem

Short-term effects: Most persons experience little or no immediate reaction. Sensitive individuals may experience radiation sickness. Delayed effects: … Premature ageing, genetic effects and some risk of tumours.

0–10 rem

Short-term effects: None.

Delayed effects: Premature ageing, mild mutations in offspring, some risk of excess tumours. Genetic and teratogenic effects.

(The health effects of fallout from Chernobyl in other countries were described by the Soviet Government as ‘insignificant’.)

Grace and Paula are attached to each other. Paula is Grace’s only niece, Grace is Paula’s only aunt. But Paula lives in London, and Grace lives down in East Sussex. They mean to see each other often, but in fact they end up talking on the phone. How are you? How are you? How’s the garden? There is nearly half a century between them.

Grace has been a feminist since she was twelve, in 1913, before the First World War. Since 1916 she’s been a pacifist. In the 1950s she went round the world with Dora Russell’s Peace Caravan. In 1950, Paula was two years old, kicked her mother and made her cry. Paula means something quite different by ‘feminist’, and doesn’t like the term ‘pacifist’. But Paula is a train-spotter. She helps watch London’s nuclear trains. They carry waste fuel for reprocessing, and reprocessing produces weapons-grade plutonium, and Paula is against the whole lethal business, so some would say she was on the side of peace. And she’s written plays on related themes which some people thought untheatrical, and others unpatriotic.

Neither Grace nor Paula breaks the law. But odd things happen to both their phones. Recently, Grace has felt harassed, but mostly they discount it. Empirical evidence isn’t enough, and the telephone system has never been efficient.

The ‘facts’ are hard to establish here. There are facts filed somewhere about the size of the buildings used by the security services, the number of staff, anonymous faces behind well screened windows. There are facts about the amount they are paid and the number of hours they work, about the colours of curtains and carpets. There are technological facts, about taps, bugs, computers. There are definitions of ‘subversive activities’: the Home Office tells us that they ‘threaten the safety or well-being of the State and ... are intended to undermine and overthrow Parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means ...’ But you needn’t actually do anything illegal, because, as one Home Secretary has noted, it is all too easy to use tactics which are not in themselves illegal for subversive ends.

If you are ‘subversive’, you may legally be watched. The definition can be stretched to fit. Unless you are an expert in surveillance techniques, there’s no way you can tell if your phone is tapped. No way you can establish that it isn’t tapped, then. This fact is not very comfortable. A lot of the targets of surveillance are domestic.

Grace and Paula go on talking on the phone.

Grace makes phonecalls to Czechoslovakia. She has a friend there, a man, Jan Dvořák. Here the facts are easier to state. No laws prevent the tapping of international phonecalls. A high proportion of all calls entering and leaving Britain are ‘trawled’ for sensitive information. British and American listening equipment – in Cornwall, in Yorkshire, in London – receives an enormous amount of traffic, most of it in no way sensitive. Phone your faraway uncle to wish him Happy Birthday and the call might be monitored for ‘sensitive’ words. Traffic to and from the Soviet bloc comes through the ‘Minor Routes’ Exchange, at Mondial House by the River Thames, just a few minutes’ walk from Caroone House, where thousands of phonecalls are monitored. Hot buildings full of wasted time, obscure initials, dandruff, boredom.

‘Happy Birthday, Jan,’ says Grace.

She’s glad she lives in England.

Being English still has a meaning, for Grace. It endures as everything else changes.

That’s why she was so angry a few weeks ago when she needed to buy a dustbin. The council specified a special kind compatible with their new automated dustcarts. She went to the new hardware store in her local town, and explained what she wanted. The shopkeeper offered her a German dustbin. ‘No thank you, I’d like something made in England.’ ‘No can do,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t exist, not what you want.’ ‘You mean we don’t make them? Why ever not?’

She would have kept the old one till the bottom fell out. She preferred old things to new. Unfortunately, if you lived long enough the old things started to die on you.

The man stood there with a patient expression. ‘It’s not a bad dustbin, dear,’ he remarked.

Grace had to have one, despite that ‘dear’. How on earth, she had wondered as she drove home, the obnoxious black plastic thing rolling around behind her, could a country get by if it didn’t make dustbins? In these days, too, when there was so much waste. Every country should have its own dustbins.

Paula and Arthur are arguing as Arthur does the washing up.

‘Thing is,’ he said as he stared into the sink-basket, a nest of noodles, tea-leaves, half a tomato, ‘it’s work, isn’t it? Britain needs work. We shouldn’t be too proud to do it.’

Paula was talking, not helping. She’d never felt at home in Arthur’s kitchen. It was like a great gamey animal, bursting with rich undigested food. ‘I’m not talking about pride,’ she told him. ‘I’m talking about toxic waste. Waste disposal is getting to be the most massive industry ...’

‘Well we do need some industry ...’

‘You’ve never seemed very keen on getting into industry. You’ve never seemed very industrious ... Never mind, the whole thing is ... our standards are so low. We’re very cheap, but not very safe. So other countries send us their poisonous waste. It’s all being dumped on England.’

‘Waste has to go somewhere,’ Arthur said dreamily, watching the bubbles come up from a cup.

‘Arthur,’ said Paula severely. ‘You’re not listening. I’m talking about toxic waste. Not bottle banks, dear, or recycling.’

‘I hear quite a lot about nuclear waste,’ Arthur half-hummed, and smiled at her, despite that ‘dear’. He shifted his enormous bulk reflectively from foot to foot. ‘It’s Saturday night. Don’t I get a night off?’

‘It’s not just nuclear waste,’ she said. ‘I know you think I’m obsessed. It’s every kind of unspeakable chemical. We don’t even have a clue what it is ... lots of it comes in sealed containers ...’

‘I’m not a public meeting, Paula. My old dad would have called you shrill.’

She didn’t listen; she pressed on. ‘What I’m trying to tell you, Arthur, is that Britain’s turning into a dustbin.’

‘That reminds me.’ His washing up was maddeningly slow. ‘Grace phoned up. She was going on and on about how she couldn’t get one. That’s what I mean about industry ... I tried to talk about it, but she rang off. You know how impatient she is. Like you. I’ve got mixed up with a family of rat-bags ... I take that back. I’m fond of Grace.’

‘Get on with the story, for God’s sake! What did she want?’ She digs him hard in the small of the back. He turns and flicks water at her furious face, then kisses her hard, so she laughs and wriggles.

‘Something about a holiday. Grace is going on holiday.’

Grace’s bookshop is closing after fifteen years. It hasn’t failed; it must be a success to keep a bookshop going on for fifteen years; all the same, she doesn’t feel happy. There is always something sad about a closing down sale. A book – three or four years of its author’s life – marked down to 50p. She’d felt almost wicked, setting the prices. And that dreadful shine in the customers’ eyes. ‘Look at these, George, lovely big books, 50p.’ ‘Well these are only 30...’ It wasn’t the villagers, of course. It was folk from the stream of loud traffic that sliced the village of Oakey in two.

That final Bank Holiday weekend had been sunny. LAST DAYS said an orange notice in her window. She hated orange, but she needed the money. So her shop, which had always felt tranquil, ageless, was suddenly forced into the modern age. That orange sign seemed to say EMERGENCY! RUSH! And they did rush in, fresh from Oakey’s new Tea Shoppe, barging into Grace’s with cream on their chins, stripping the shop like locusts.

When everything had vanished, the shop looked so small, the shelves so shoddy and makeshift, so grey, like a life after the living person had left it. Was this all there was? Was it all so finite? Must everything finally shrink and fade?

Grace needed a holiday. She’d been on holiday in March, with Paula, but it had been hectic with the child around. Now she found herself longing for whatever was lost, whatever she and her life had been. And so her thoughts turned to Seabourne. Going to Seabourne would be going home. She was born there in 1901, an unimaginable time ago. She has not been there for twenty-odd years, but nothing would have changed in Seabourne. Seabourne, to Grace, was England. And so she arranged a week by the sea.

It offered a return, it offered an escape. No letters to answer (not that many letters came; people didn’t bother with letters now). No garden to weed. No shelves to dust.

And the phone – no phonecalls either. She didn’t want to think about the phonecalls. Let the phone ring in her empty house. Whoever it was wouldn’t have the satisfaction of making her pick it up and hear silence.

The last few times she herself had said nothing. Just waited. To deprive him of the pleasure of her voice. Yet doing it gave her a bad feeling. Not that Grace felt fear; she would not feel fear. The girls of Compton Hall were not raised to feel fear ... It was disturbing, all the same. As if by staying silent she had joined in the game, admitted the danger, become dangerous herself.

In London, flat on his naked back in the yard of his ground-floor flat, Bruno Janes is ready to play. On his hundredth sit-up, he hardly hurts. The adrenalin pushes, the endorphins flow. The red hairs stick to his fine pale skin. He can do another hundred, easy ...

As his muscular torso swings up and forward his eyes fire bullets into the sky. Not easy to shoot, as you move at speed. He is doing particularly well today, scoring twenty-six pigeons without cheating. Things are going his way all right, today.

Around 160 sit-ups, it always got tough. That was when character told. Bruno had character, certainly. That’s why they’re giving him his chance, at last. 170 – sweat breaks out all over his body, but his rhythm doesn’t falter. Never any turning back ... You can’t be soft if you want to be hard ... Bruno’s head, swinging up, now forward, now back, is an echo-chamber of tags and phrases. At 180 it’s easy again, a downhill sprint to the kill – 200. He hardly pauses, rolls over on his belly. Brief pleasant pressure of the stone on his genitals.

He’s into the pattern of his press-ups now. He always does a hundred. The tendons cord on his square freckled hands. It’s easy, so easy. He wishes they could see him, the man of the moment, the man for the job …

For the past five years things haven’t been easy. Working for that wanker Harvey in Mitcham, all the dirty work for none of the money, then two dodgy years on his own, pouring out money on crap to impress the punters, embossed stationery, printed cards:

BRUNO JANES, ESQUIRE Private Inquiry AgentMATRIMONIAL * SECURITY * INTERNAL FRAUD Your Every Requirement Discreetly MetCONFIDENTIALITY GUARANTEED

In the end he had started to make a bit of money, but there hadn’t been enough action. It was endless waiting with cameras for people who never came. It was break-ins where you weren’t allowed to do damage, enemies you couldn’t get physical with. What was the point of being hard as nails if you spent your days cramped up in a Cortina parked outside the wrong building?

38, 39. Things were changing at last. They had contacted Bruno; he’d known they would. 41, 42. A fighting-machine ... A man’s man ... They had called on him ... For Bruno is a patriot. Queen and Country, pushing up, coming down, in the national interest, 72, 73, they can count, count, count on me ... They had reached him just in time, he thinks. He might not have been able to hang on for ever. London was getting hotter. Things were getting dirtier.

The day before Paula went to meet the journalist, she saw a red-headed man chasing a rat. It was heavy, darkish, going hell-for-leather down the sunny street with the man behind it, running head down in a pink-faced frenzy. But the rat darted in through some gateless gateposts, and the man skidded to a halt. He stood for a moment staring after it, hands on hips, face streaming with sweat. His arms and legs were pink and naked. She didn’t like the rat; too fat, too fast. Even more than that though, she didn’t like the man. What was he intending to do with the rat when he caught it? Strangle it, kick it against the wall? But he disappeared into a fish and chip shop. Perhaps he had meant to eat it.

There were a lot of rodents in London. Only yesterday she’d seen bits of rubbish moving in the shadows between the tracks at Euston. Things come up from the crumbling sewers.

Underneath the city’s shining surface of plate-glass windows, Porsches, computers, essential structures are rotting away. The dark is furry, slipping, sliding. Summer’s come early; it’s intensely hot. In Regent’s Park, Arab women are walking slowly through the rose garden, their black robes humming cones of heat, tired eyes caged in sweaty bird-masks. Behind them, bodyguards pant in suits. This isn’t what they meant by England. A trembling desire can be felt in the heat haze through which the sun finally starts to sink; caught in the maze of mirrored towers, trains, rats, telephone lines, everyone wants to escape.

But Paula has to meet the journalist.

The radical journalist is plump and dark, a boyish bespectacled figure. For the first ten minutes she gets to know his back as he plays with his computer. His secretary has showed her into a chair which affords a clear view over his shoulder. The computer has a sky-blue screen edged with emerald-green and he writes on it in white. She reads uncomprehendingly at first, eager to discover his secrets, though they cannot be all that secret if he is offering them to her view. WEDNESDAY 10.00 Car to service (shop en route) 11.00 Running. He’s already got Friday pretty well sorted out: after Running there’s Large Pine Nuts etc (Waitrose). But it’s only Monday now, she thinks. And he’s already focused on that Large Pine Nuts. There are dates, as well, names, addresses, but most of it seems to be rather domestic. His body language says important, busy, a busy man with a computer diary.

At last he swings round and shakes her hand, and she tells him what she wants to know ...

‘There’s nothing in it,’ he said. ‘There isn’t a shred of evidence.’

‘I agree there would have been no point,’ she said. ‘But a lot of what they do seems to have no point.’

‘You know, of course, the security services are no friends of mine,’ he said. ‘But they’re very busy men.’ And he flashed a faintly stagey smile, intensely knowing, almost smug (though a radical journalist would not be smug).

She felt herself getting hotter and hotter under the pressure of his disbelief. ‘I’m assuming they’re paranoid,’ she said. ‘If they’re always plotting themselves, maybe they assume other people are too.’

‘They’re short of resources,’ he said. ‘These are grey bureaucrats without enough money. A lot of people think they’re being watched, but they aren’t.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she murmured. On the instant she decided not to tell him what had happened to her – what she thought had happened to her. The misbehaving telephone, the mail that came late, the envelopes obviously torn open, casually restuck with Sellotape. Most absurd of all, the man in the seven-strong audience at the Poetry Society. She had rather vainly addressed the poets on the virtues of writing against nuclear weapons. He wasn’t at all like the other six weirdos; a blockish man in a grey raincoat, he asked unfriendly, unpoetic questions. In the bar afterwards he came and stood close. ‘I normally step over people like you,’ he said, his grey shoulder too near her face, turned to exclude the other people present. ‘I take quite an interest in this sort of thing. I work for the Ministry of Defence.’ And perhaps he did, or perhaps he was a fantasist. The story was too far-fetched to tell.

The journalist was leaning back on his chair, examining her like a clever schoolboy, a long way away behind his rimless specs, his computer glinting behind him. That amused expression must be aimed at her. Suddenly irritated, she pressed on. ‘It does happen, all the same ... People I know in the peace movement have had strange break-ins, or their mail messed about with ... so it doesn’t seem that implausible. That it could have happened to Hilda Murrell.’

‘But why would they bother with her?’

‘OK, I know I can’t prove that they did. I’m not sure myself, that’s part of the problem.’

‘Why would they want to murder her?’ He was bored; he wanted to talk about himself.

‘No one said they intended to murder her. I would assume it was an accident, or a maniac. There are always mavericks ... if someone slightly strange was put on to her. A private detective, say ... it’s been suggested.’

He put his hands behind his head, increasing his apparent surface area, then swung his chair back and forwards, splaying plump thighs and stroking them. ‘Even I,’ he said with great emphasis. ‘Even I. I’ve got files full of stuff which is of interest to them. But I’ve only had five days of surveillance in my life.’

As an argument, it was unanswerable. Professional men, it seemed to say, would save their attention for professional men. Paula hadn’t realised how competitive it was, being a subject for surveillance.

Part of her is happy to believe him, though. Part of her does believe him. Part of her would like to believe everything she’s told, by the police, the television, the government; by the famous radical journalist.

That the fallout from Chernobyl is insignificant. That nuclear power is safe. That nuclear weapons protect us. That Hilda Murrell’s murder had nothing to do with the security services.

That this is England, for goodness’ sake, and nothing ever happens in England.

She would like to believe it, but she doesn’t. She thinks a great deal is happening in England. She thinks a lot of it is bad.

She forces herself to know about it.

Every week, ten metric tons of nuclear waste is carried through the heart of London. About 44,000 half-pounds of butter, but it isn’t butter they’re spreading. The trains carry spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors. ‘Spent’ is a misnomer, actually. The rods have the highest concentration of radioactivity of any substance on earth. They come by train in huge finned flasks from power stations in the south and east – Sizewell, Bradwell, Dungeness – on their way to reprocessing in Cumbria, where even more waste will be produced. Three or four nuclear waste trains a week, running close to the sleeping backs of houses and the people sleeping behind those walls. All down the line the houses sleep.

Arthur and his two-year-old daughter Sally live 25 metres from the railway line. Arthur has a cheerful temperament, and Sally is too young to think about it, and Paula worries herself sick, though she only stays there a few nights a week.

The day that she went to meet the journalist, though, she had other things to worry about. Racketing back to Kensal Green in a hot train, she thought about what he’d said. If he was right, she should abandon her novel. But was he right? And did it matter? She didn’t want to discuss it with Arthur. Half of him didn’t like her sticking her neck out, and he would only gloat. What she needed was time on her own; she decided to sleep in her flat in Camden. She rang Arthur at the hotel where he worked.

‘You’ll have to pick up Sally yourself,’ she said.

‘I’ll miss you,’ he said. ‘I was going to cook you some spinach. No one was hungry today, there’s bags of it left ... promise you’ll eat something decent.’

‘I’ve been feeling sick again,’ she said. ‘In any case, I’ve given up spinach.’

‘Go to the doctor while you’re in Camden.’

‘Piss off, Arthur. I’m fine.’

‘Take care, in any case.’

‘I always do.’

‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Is anyone on duty this week?’

‘I said I might go. But we’re not supposed to talk about it.’

‘Sod that. Cruise missiles. Gorbachev. Trident. Afternoon boys, are you enjoying yourselves?’

‘You’re drunk, Arthur,’ she hissed, outraged, though she sometimes made the same kind of joke herself. If they were listening. If they were there. What could you do but laugh at them?

‘You haven’t told me how it went with Machin. Did he think you were on the right lines?’

She wasn’t prepared to lose face. ‘It was really interesting,’ she said. ‘He completely changed my train of thought. Lots of new things to work on. I’m off to Camden to get on with it. Can’t tell you about it on the phone, Arthur.’

As she walked down the road to the station once more, she remembered the rat she’d seen yesterday, how fear made its heavy body seem to fly. Where had it gone, after it dashed between the gateposts. Whose dark kitchen was it hiding in?

She remembered the rat, but she forgot the man, who passed her walking in the opposite direction, returning from work in a light grey suit, his eyes invisible behind mirrored sunglasses.

He turns, briefly, and watches her back.

Greta, her landlady, had gone to Rome. Paula was the only person in the building that night. Her typewriter echoed. It was quiet and hot. It was 6 a.m. when the thumping began.

They must have thought she would be asleep. Actually she was awake, with the newly familiar feverish wakefulness, lying there starting at a crack in the ceiling.

They battered so hard that the room seemed to shake, and she saw her own hands were shaking too as they clawed at the sheets for comfort. It couldn’t be her door they were pounding on. It must be her door they were pounding on. And there were thuggish voices shouting. Drunks? Maniacs? What should she do? Police, she thought fleetingly. Call the police. But they wouldn’t come out just for that, surely.

Perhaps she already knew who it was. It seemed like minutes that she lay there listening, praying they would simply go away. In the end, she understood. They would never go away. Everything was planned to happen like this. Part of her life was ending.

So it seemed more frightening to stay in bed and be caught unprepared, half-naked. She dressed herself clumsily. Her fingers felt numb. As she padded down the hall, they were kicking the door, tremendous blows that made it quiver on its hinges. The anger behind it stopped her in her tracks. Her heart was a hard ball, jumping, hurting. Just as she was going to dart back into the bedroom and phone someone – anyone, someone must help – the letterbox lifted; a draught of cool air; then two mad eyes staring in at her, the violent glitter of something alive. Nothing between them and her. She held herself, frozen with fear.

‘Open up. Police,’ a rough voice shouted. And she knew that she had no choice. Hypnotised, she opened the door. There were four men, not in uniform, with slab-like chests and contemptuous faces.

Her fear amused them. They stood much too close. They stared at her legs, which were naked. They told her they were CID. They knew her name, they had the right address, but they were looking for someone she had never heard of. They insisted they had ‘reason to believe’ she was sheltering a wanted man, Raymond someone. ‘He’s a black fellow. You like black men, don’t you? Heh-heh.’

They were already searching the flat – the door of the wardrobe squealing on its hinges, saucepans crashing in a cupboard, the heavy smash of a pot-plant – before she remembered to ask them for a warrant; but she knew it would be useless to ask them for a warrant. She suddenly knew she was going to die, but before she died she was going to be sick, and she rushed past a fleshy, hostile back and threw up her stomach in the bathroom, cramping and retching again and again. She knelt there afterwards utterly drained, too weak to move out of the vomit. Then they were hammering the door behind her.

‘Miss Timms? It’s no good you hiding in there. We’ve got some questions to ask you.’