Restless (33 page)

'Throw, Jochen!' I shouted spontaneously – and saw him hurl his egg. Hamid let him stay up a second longer and then slid him down his front to the ground.

'I hit a man on the shoulder,' Jochen said, 'one of the men in sun-glasses.'

'Good boy,' I said. 'Now let's go home. That's enough excitement for the day.'

We said our goodbyes and walked away from the demonstration up Broad Street and on to the Banbury Road. After a minute or two we were joined, surprisingly, by Ludger and Ilse. Jochen began at once to explain to them that he had deliberately not aimed at the lady because her dress looked pretty – and expensive.

'Hey, Ruth,' Ludger said stepping in beside me, 'thanks for the warning about the pig.'

I saw Ilse had taken Jochen's hand; she was talking to him in German.

'I thought she was in more serious trouble,' I said. 'I think they just want to warn her.'

'No, no,' Ludger said, with a nervous laugh. He lowered his voice. 'Her head is a bit fucked-up. A bit crazy. Nothing heavy, you know.'

'Fine,' I said. 'Just like the rest of us, then.'

Jochen reached for Ludger's hand. 'Give me a swing, Ludger.'

So Ludger and Ilse between them began to swing Jochen off his feet as we walked homewards, Jochen laughing with uncontrolled pleasure, calling at every swing to be launched higher, higher.

I dropped back a little, bent down to adjust the strap on my shoe, and didn't spot the police car until it had pulled up alongside me. Through the open window Detective Constable Frobisher smiled at me.

'Miss Gilmartin – I thought it was you. Could I have a quick word?' He stepped out of the car, the driver remaining inside. I sensed Ludger, Ilse and Jochen continuing on their way regardless and managed not to look at them.

'I just wanted you to know,' Frobisher said. 'The German girl – seems she's back in London again.'

'Oh, right.'

'Did you see the demo?'

'Yes, I was in Broad Street. Some of my students were participating. Iranians, you know.'

'Yeah, that was what I was wanting to talk to you about,' he said, stepping away from the car. 'You move, I take it, among the foreign-student community.'

'I wouldn't say "move", exactly – but I do teach foreign students all year round, pretty much.' I flicked my hair back out of my eyes and used the gesture to glance up the road. Ludger, Ilse and Jochen were about a hundred yards off, standing still now, looking back at me, Ilse holding Jochen's hand.

'Let me put it this way, Miss Gilmartin,' Frobisher said, making his voice confidential, semi-urgent. 'We'd be very interested if you saw and heard anything unusual – political, like: anarchists, radicals. The Italians, the Germans, the Arabs… Anything that strikes you – just give us a call, let us know.' He smiled, genuinely, not politely, and I suddenly saw the real Frobisher for an instant, saw his serious zeal. Under the formulaic pleasantries and the air of earnest dullness, was someone shrewder, cleverer, more ambitious. 'You can get closer to these people than we can, you hear things we'd never hear,' he said, letting his guard drop again, 'and if you gave us a call from time to time – doesn't matter if it's just a hunch – we'd really appreciate it.'

Is this how it begins? I thought. Is this how your life as a spy begins?

'Sure,' I said. 'If I ever heard anything. But they're fairly innocuous and ordinary – all trying to learn English.'

'I know. Ninety-nine point nine per cent. But you've seen the graffiti,' he said. 'We're talking Italian far right, German far left. They must be here if they're writing that stuff on the walls.' It was true: Oxford was more and more spattered with meaningless Euro-agitprop slogans –
Ordine Nuevo, das Volk wird dich rachen, Caca-pipi-talisme
– meaningless to the English, that is.

'I understand,' I said. 'If I hear anything I'll give you a call. No problem: I've got your number.'

He thanked me again, said he'd be in touch, told me to 'take care', shook my hand and climbed back into his car, which did a swift U-turn and headed back down the road towards the city centre.

I rejoined the waiting trio.

'Why did that policeman want you, Mummy?'

'He said he was looking for a boy who threw an egg.' The adults all laughed but Jochen wasn't amused.

'You've used that joke before. It's still not funny.'

As we headed off, I drew Ilse back a pace or two.

'They think you're back in London, for some reason. So I suppose you're safe here.'

'Thank you for this, Ruth. I'm very grateful.'

'Why are you begging? They said you were begging aggressively – with threats.'

She sighed. 'Only at the beginning I was begging. Yeah. But not anymore.' She shrugged. 'On the streets there is much indifference, you know. It was making me angry.'

'What were you doing in London, anyway?'

'I left my home – in Dusseldorf. My best friend from school started to fuck my father. It was impossible, I had to leave.'

'Yes,' I said, 'yes, I can see how you might have had to… What're you going to do now?'

Ilse thought for a while, made a vague gesture with her hand. 'I think Ludger and I will find a flat in Oxford. We can squat, maybe. I like Oxford. Ludger says maybe we can do some porno.'

'In Oxford?'

'No, in Amsterdam. Ludger says he knows a guy who's making videos.'

I glanced at the skinny blonde girl walking along beside me as she rummaged in her bag for a cigarette – almost pretty, just something blunt and rounded about her features keeping her ordinary. An ordinary girl.

'I wouldn't do porno, Ilse,' I said. 'It's just to help sad men wank.'

'Yeah…' She thought a bit. 'You're right. I rather selling drugs.'

We caught up with Ludger and Jochen and wandered homewards, chatting about the demo and Jochen's bull's-eye with the egg, first throw. But I found I was thinking of Frobisher's offer, for some reason: anything you hear, even a hunch – we'd really appreciate it.

Ottawa , Canada . 1941

EVA DELECTORSKAYA LOOKED OUT of the bus window at the coloured lights and the Christmas decorations in the windows of Ottawa 's department stores. She was on her way to work and had managed to find a seat close to the front, as usual, not far from the driver, so she could more easily monitor who stepped aboard and who stepped off. She opened her novel and pretended to read. She was headed for Somerset Street in downtown Ottawa but she tended to get off either a few stops before her destination or a few stops after and, wherever she chose to disembark, she would take a different, roundabout route before she arrived at the Ministry of Supply. Such precautions added about twenty minutes to her journey to work but she felt calmer and more at ease during the day, knowing she had carried them out.

She was sure, almost 100 per cent sure, as sure as anyone could be, that no one had ever followed her during these few days she'd been living and working in Ottawa, but the constant routine checks were a part of her life now: it was almost two weeks since she had flown from New York – two weeks tomorrow, she realised – but she could still take nothing for granted.

She had walked into Sainte-Justine as the village was beginning to wake and stir and had ordered a coffee and doughnut with the first customers at the drugstore before catching the early bus to Montreal. There, she had had her long hair cut short and dyed a chestnut brown and spent that night in a small hotel near the station. She had taken to her bed at eight and slept through twelve hours. It wasn't until the next morning, the Monday, that she bought a newspaper and read about Sunday's attack on Pearl Harbor. She skimmed the story quickly, incredulously, and then reread it more slowly: eight battleships sunk, hundreds dead and missing, a date which will live in infamy, war declared on Japan. And she thought, buoyantly, simply: we've won. This is what we had wanted and now we will win – not next week, not next year, but we will win. She became almost tearful because she knew how important it was, trying to imagine how the news was being received at BSC, and had a sudden crazy urge – immediately rejected – to telephone Sylvia. What would Lucas Romer be feeling, she wondered? Was she more secure now? Would they call off the search?

Somehow she doubted it, she said to herself, as she walked up the steps to the new annexe of the Ministry of Supply and took the elevator to the typing pool on the third floor. She was early, the first of the four women who acted as shorthand typists for the half-dozen civil servants who occupied this floor of this division of the ministry. She began to relax, somewhat: she always felt safer at work because of the anonymity provided by the number of people in the building and because she could cover herself journeying there and homeward. It was during her time off that the caution and the constant suspicion re-established itself – as if she became an individual once she left the office, an individual who might attract attention. Here on the third floor she was just a member of a typing pool amongst innumerable typing pools.

She took the cover off her typewriter and leafed through the documents in her in-tray. She was quite happy with her work: it made no demands on her and it was going to provide her with a ticket home, or so she hoped.

Eva knew there were only two ways for a single woman to obtain passage to England from Canada: either in uniform – the Red Cross, nursing, or signals – or in government. She considered government the swiftest route and so had travelled to Ottawa from Montreal on Monday 8 December and had registered with a secretarial agency specialising in providing secretaries for government departments and Parliament. Her shorthand, her fluent French and her typing speed were more than adequate qualifications and within twenty-four hours she had been sent for interview at the new annexe of the Ministry of Supply on Somerset Street, a solid unadorned office block of grey stone, the colour of old snow.

On her first night in Montreal, in her hotel, she had spent an hour with a powerful magnifying glass, a needle and some black Indian ink diluted with a little milk, painstakingly altering her passport name from 'Allerdice' to 'Atterdine'. There was nothing she could do about 'Margery' but decided to call herself 'Mary' as if it were a preferred diminutive. The passport would not survive inspection by an expert with a microscope but it would certainly pass muster beneath the hurried glance of an immigration official. Eva Delectorskaya became Eve Dalton became Margery Allerdice became Mary Atterdine – her tracks, she hoped, were slowly being erased.

After a few days at her job she began asking around the women and girls in the ministry's canteen what the chances were of being posted to the London embassy. She discovered there was a fairly regular traffic of staff to and fro: every month or two some went out, some came back. She had to go to personnel and fill in a form; the fact that she was British might make the whole process easier. The story she grudgingly, shyly, told to any who asked was that she had come to Canada to be married and had been grievously let down by her Canadian fiancé. She had moved to Vancouver to be with him but as the marriage plans remained suspiciously vague she realised she had been cruelly misled and misused. Alone and adrift in Vancouver, she had travelled east to seek passage home, one way or another. Anyone who asked her more precise questions – Who was the man? Where had she lived? – prompted sniffles or genuine tears: she was still raw and humiliated, it was all too upsetting to talk about. Sympathetic questioners understood and tended not to probe further.

She had found a boarding-house on a quiet street – Bradley Street – in the bourgeois suburb of Westboro, run by Mr and Mrs Maddox Richmond, all of whose clients were young ladies. Bed and breakfast was offered at ten dollars a week; half board at fifteen, rates by the week or the month. 'Open fires on chilly days' it said on the small sign attached to the gatepost. Most of their 'paying guests' were immigrants: two Czech sisters, a Swedish woman, a country girl from Alberta, and Eva. Family prayers were held in the downstairs parlour at 6.00 p.m. for those who wished to attend and from time to time Eva duly and with unostentatious piety did. She ate out, choosing diners and restaurants near the ministry, anonymous places, busy, where the turnover of hungry clients was swift. She found a public library that opened late where some nights she could read undisturbed until 9.00 p.m. and, on her first weekend off, travelled to Quebec City, simply to be away. She really only used the Richmond Guest House to sleep in and she never came to know the other paying guests better than as nodding acquaintances.

This quiet life, this regular routine suited her and she found she came to enjoy living in Ottawa almost without effort: its wide boulevards, its well-kept parks, its solid, Gothically grandiose public buildings, its tranquil streets and civic cleanliness were exactly what she needed, she realised, as she pondered her next move.

But all the while she was there she covered herself. In a notebook she logged the registration of every car parked in the street and learned to which household they belonged. She noted down the names of the owners of the twenty-three houses on Bradley Street, opposite and on either side of the Richmonds, and kept track of the comings and goings in casual chats with Mrs Richmond: Valerie Kominski had a new boyfriend, Mr and Mrs Doubleday were on vacation, Fielding Bauer had just been 'let go' from the building firm he worked for. She wrote everything down, adding new facts, crossing out redundant or outdated ones, looking all the time for the anomaly that would alert her. With her first weekly salary check she had purchased some sensible items of clothing and dipped into her dollar supply to buy a bulky beaver coat against the cold that was growing as Christmas approached.

She tried to analyse and second-guess what might be going on at BSC. Despite the euphoria of Pearl Harbor and the arrival of the USA as the long-awaited ally, she imagined that they would still be investigating, digging deep, following up leads. Morris Devereux dies and Eve Dalton disappears that very night – not events that can be casually ignored. She was sure that everything that Morris had suspected of Romer would now be laid at his door: if there were Abwehr ghosts in BSC did anyone need to look any further than Devereux and Dalton? But she also knew – and this gave her satisfaction, made her more determined – that her continued disappearance, her invisibility, would be a persistent, annoying worry and goad to Romer. If anyone would be urging that the search be maintained at its highest level it would be he. She would never be complacent or relax, she told herself: Margery – 'call me Mary' – Atterdine would continue to lead her life as unobtrusively and as cautiously as she could.