She started talking nervously. ‘Yes. A boy from my village, you see … I do my best, but you never know if the rules have changed and if someone is going to say something.’ She took a handkerchief and dabbed her brow. She waved Tibbot away when he tried to put his hand on her arm. I heard the man’s voice again, muffled by the door between us, but closer. ‘And what then? What then?’

The door opened, but it was a girl, aged about eighteen, with her hair in the short style the Party encouraged. She sat down and no one said anything else. We just waited. The waiting went on for five, then ten minutes. Another door slammed and ours opened.

‘Identity cards.’ He was aged about forty – a little older than they usually were. NatSec preferred young men and women because they were more eager to shape the new world. It was the Secs’ belief that made them so frightening. I don’t think I could ever have believed anything as strongly as they did.

I saw Tibbot look past the Sec, to the train door leading on to the platform. He was sizing the man up, then glancing at me. I could tell he was coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth any rough stuff – he could probably handle himself, but not with me to look after too. The old woman and the girl who had sat down offered up their cards. They were taken, held up to the light, bent back and forth to test them and handed back without comment. Tibbot drew out his warrant card.

‘All right?’ he asked as he showed it. The Sec tried to take it from his grip. ‘No need for anything, is there?’

‘There is if I say there is.’ His expression was challenging. He took the card from Tibbot and looked at it, then at him. ‘This way,’ he muttered. ‘And you too.’ I looked to Tibbot; he nodded. We did as we were told.

Stepping down on to a sullen-looking platform, we found it empty apart from the other Sec, a younger man, my age and athletic-looking. ‘Now come on, mate,’ Tibbot chuckled. ‘What’s this all about, eh?’ A solitary light shone over a station sign that had been so broken and weather-beaten it was illegible. I guessed that we must have been close to Blackheath, the Closed Village where the Politburo lived with their NatSec minders.

‘In there,’ the senior man replied, pointing to the waiting room. The doorway was empty, with rusted hinges sticking uselessly out of the brickwork. Behind us, the train began to move off, the wheels whining as they strained to spin, and we watched the blank face of the old woman in the carriage disappear. ‘I said in there.’

‘All right, come on, a bit of professional comradeship,’ Tibbot said, still trying to be pally.